We burned identity into silicon
before anyone made us.
Every Justworx device carries a unique cryptographic key fused into its chip at manufacture — unreadable, unforgeable, impossible to move to another unit. We did that for our own reasons. It’s about to become everyone’s problem.
Regulators stopped asking for secure.
They started asking for proof.
The shift is subtle and it changes everything. Frameworks like the EU Cyber Resilience Act don’t ask manufacturers to build secure products — an unauditable claim. They require them to demonstrate it: secure boot, authenticated updates, supply-chain integrity, vulnerability handling, across a product’s entire supported life.
Here’s what makes that a hardware problem rather than a paperwork one. Most of those obligations are unsatisfiable in practice without a hardware root of trust.
- Verifying a firmware signature requires a trusted key to verify against.
- Proving a device is genuine rather than counterfeit requires an identity that cannot be forged.
- Confirming a specific unit was patched requires knowing which unit it is.
The regulation never says “burn in a key.” It demands outcomes that can’t be reached any other way. That’s a more durable position than a mandate, because it survives changes in the wording.
One key. One physical unit. No way out.
At manufacture, a unique private key is generated and burned into one-time-programmable memory. The chip can use it for cryptographic operations but never reveal it — no firmware path, no debug port, no read command. The device proves it holds the key without ever exposing it.
That key receives a certificate signed by a manufacturer authority, chaining to a root. Anyone can walk the chain and verify a device is genuine.
Why hardware rather than software. A software key can be copied — once, and then a million times, from anywhere, for free. A hardware key means one key, one physical unit. Attacking it requires physical possession and laboratory equipment, per device. It doesn’t make attack impossible; it makes it non-scalable, which is the property that actually matters.
Not the key. Everything around it.
A few cents of fused memory is a commodity. The product is everything around it:
Secure provisioning at manufacture
Injecting keys in a factory without leaking them to the contract manufacturer. This is the genuinely hard part, and the part most people underestimate.
Certificate authority operation
Issuance, renewal and revocation across millions of units for a decade.
An attestation service
Something a relying party can query to verify a device’s claims at scale.
Evidence
Records in the form an assessor will accept.
Build on Justworx and a partner inherits all of it. Not security as a feature of a switch — an entire compliance workstream that doesn’t need staffing.
The section that makes the rest believable.
- Documentation is the deliverable, not the engineering. Knowing our silicon is sound isn’t the same as being able to evidence it. A compliance product means maintaining revision records, vendor advisories and documented assessments for every shipping module — unglamorous, continuous work, and it’s the actual product.
- Certification regimes are their own programmes. Marketing modules as ready for a specific framework means engaging with that framework formally. That’s a defined body of work with real cost, and it has to be done properly or not claimed at all.
- Post-quantum is a lifecycle question we have to answer early. A server rotates its keys tomorrow morning. Fused memory cannot. Post-quantum signature schemes are substantially larger than the elliptic-curve keys deployed today — which collides with both fused-memory budgets and a mesh designed around compact payloads. Standards are settled; deprecation timelines for today’s algorithms arrive well before the threat does.
- Our answer is crypto-agility designed into the next generation rather than bolted on later — sufficient key storage, an updatable trust anchor, and using the fused key to bootstrap a rotatable operational identity rather than serving as the permanent one. That’s a decision made before silicon is finalised, and we’re making it now rather than discovering it in 2032.
Honest about the distance.
Per-device fused keys, secure factory provisioning, private APN, encrypted tunnel from SIM to cloud, and cryptographic isolation between every unit on the network. All shipping.
Formal certification pathways, and the documentation infrastructure that turns a good architecture into admissible evidence.
Crypto-agile Cortex-class silicon with a ten-year runway built in from the first design review.