Top Three Ways to Stay Ahead of Cybersecurity Legislations

How to Stay Ahead in a CRA-Inspired World

With the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) now in force, the global cybersecurity landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Countries around the world are either adopting similar legislation or aligning their frameworks with the CRA to generate secure digital ecosystems. Even companies in jurisdictions without formal cybersecurity laws are being pulled into compliance—because doing business with CRA-compliant partners demands it.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the core requirements common across global cybersecurity legislation and share three key strategies to help your organization stay ahead of the curve.

The CRA’s Ripple Effect Across the Globe

The CRA mandates that products with digital elements—from smartwatches to industrial IoT devices—must be secure by design and throughout their lifecycle. It requires manufacturers, software developers, importers and distributors to:

• Integrate cybersecurity during product design and development
• Provide timely security updates and vulnerability patches
• Create transparency about cybersecurity features
• Report incidents and cooperate with national authorities

This regulation has inspired similar moves globally with many adopting privacy-first principles, security-by-design mandates and incident reporting requirements.

Common Threads in Global Cybersecurity Laws

Despite regional differences, most cybersecurity laws share these foundational elements:

• Security by Design: Products must be built with cybersecurity as a core feature, not added later
• Lifecycle Security Management: Ongoing support, updates and vulnerability patching are mandatory
• Transparency and Accountability: Clear documentation of security features and responsibilities
• Incident Reporting: Timely disclosure of breaches and vulnerabilities to authorities
• Data Protection: Alignment with privacy laws like GDPR is often required

These principles are now considered baseline expectations for any company operating internationally.

Top Three Strategies to Stay Ahead

To thrive in this new regulatory environment, we recommend these proactive strategies:

1. Build Security in by Design – Start With a Threat Model

Security should never be an afterthought. The most effective way to provide compliance and resilience is to embed security from the very beginning of product development.

• Start with a threat model: Identify potential attack vectors based on your product’s architecture, use cases and deployment environment.
• Design for defense: Use secure coding practices, enforce least privilege and isolate critical cryptographic functions and secrets.
• Regulatory alignment: Many laws, including the CRA, require documentation of security design decisions. A threat model provides a structured way to demonstrate due diligence and compliance.

Pro Tip: Use threat modeling methodologies like STRIDE or TARA modeling to scope threats early and iterate as your design evolves.

2. Build to Scale Remote Firmware Updates

Security doesn’t stop at the launch of your product. Regulations now require manufacturers to maintain product security for the first five years or throughout its lifecycle, which means being able to patch vulnerabilities quickly and securely.

• Secure update infrastructure: Implement cryptographic signing of firmware, secure boot and rollback protection to certify that only trusted updates are installed.
• Scalability matters: Whether you’re managing 100 devices or 1,000,000, your update system must be robust, automated, monitored and capable of handling diverse connectivity environments.
• Compliance-ready: Lifecycle security is a core requirement in CRA and similar laws. Remote updates are the most efficient way to meet this obligation without costly recalls or manual servicing.

Learn how the keySTREAM cloud service pairs with TrustMANAGER devices to enable firmware over the air updates in this blog post.

3. Compliance Made Easy: Upgrade Security Without Changing Your MCU

Leverage hardware-based security ICs to simplify compliance. Software-based security can be flexible, but it’s also vulnerable. Hardware-based security ICs offer a trusted foundation for compliance and protection and add robust yet foundational security to help meet CRA compliant standards.

• Built-in cryptography: Our security ICs include certified cryptographic engine accelerators (AES, RSA, ECC) that meet standards like FIPS 140-3 or Common Criteria JIL resistance.
• Hardened firmware verification: Operate ECDSA verify operation within the standalone secure boundary of the security IC wherein the keys will also be protected.
• Secure key storage: These chips protect sensitive assets like encryption keys, credentials and firmware hashes from physical and software attacks.
• Tamper resistance: The ICs include countermeasures against side-channel attacks, fault injection and reverse engineering—features that are hard to replicate in software alone.
• Compliance accelerator: Using certified hardware can significantly reduce the burden of proving compliance, especially for CRA, NIS2 and similar frameworks.

Pro Tip: Choose ICs with pre-certified security profiles to streamline your product’s certification process and reduce time-to-market. View our product and services here.

Final Thoughts

The CRA is just the beginning. As cybersecurity legislation becomes a global norm, companies must evolve from reactive compliance to proactive resilience. By embedding security into your product DNA and aligning with international best practices, you’ll not only meet regulatory demands—you’ll build trust, reduce risk and unlock new market opportunities.

Read our white paper to learn more on our CRA solution.