Unique, protected device credentials are foundational to securing devices, data, and communications—and are increasingly mandated by standards and regulations from NIST, ENISA, and the Connectivity Standards Alliance. While secure elements and dedicated storage can establish a hardware root of trust, these protections are only as strong as the provisioning processes that generate, distribute, and inject the cryptographic keys and certificates.
In practice, globalized manufacturing environments present significant challenges: high staff turnover, fragmented IT infrastructure, and uneven physical security create risks of credential leakage or cloning—risks that can propagate rapidly through the supply chain. Weak provisioning practices can compromise even the most hardened device platforms.
This session presents a comprehensive supply-chain PKI provisioning architecture designed to remain secure even if individual network nodes or encryption layers are breached. Drawing on two decades of hands-on deployment experience, we share practical strategies for secure device provisioning through the use of hardware security modules (HSMs), cryptographic tokens, layered encryption, and software safeguards. We also highlight anti-cloning mechanisms that ensure device credentials cannot be duplicated or misused at any point in the manufacturing process—enabling resilient, end-to-end protection in dynamic and distributed ecosystems.