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I want to enable secure communication by embedding a certificate chip for a PKI in my embedded system so I can sign outgoing messages and make certificate challenges. I was expecting that there exist particular chips that have these certificates installed and that I can query these chips through some interface (I2C etc.). But I am unable to find them.

Is my understanding of the idea somewhat off? Do such chips exist? What is such a chip called or what companies sell them?

If such chips are available, how would I best add them to my system? (I want to start with an Arduino with the GSM shield sending encrypted messages.)

Examples of such chips are the ones inside SIM cards, SmartCards or passports.

Hauke Holtkamp
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These chips are not common, but they exists. There are 'Trusted Platform Modules' which contain many encryption functions, but they are in general hard to use. For your case, you probably want to look at ATECC108A - Atmel CryptoAuthentication chip. It is SO-8, you talk to it over I2C, and it has PKI engine using elliptic curves (which have much shorter keys than RSA-based systems). The only big problem with that is that there is no public full datasheet for it. I have no idea how hard is it to obtain it.

theamk
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