Kigen Brings SGP.32 v1.3 to eSA-Certified Automotive eSIMs

Kigen Brings SGP.32 v1.3 to eSA-Certified Automotive eSIMs

By Manuel Nau, Lead Editor at IoT Business News.

Kigen has achieved GSMA eUICC Security Assurance certification for an automotive eSIM supporting SGP.32 v1.3, combining remote connectivity management with a security architecture designed for connected vehicles that may remain operational for more than a decade.

Connected vehicles create an unusually difficult lifecycle problem for cellular IoT. A telematics architecture selected during vehicle development may still need to support network changes, new connectivity providers and evolving security requirements many years after the vehicle leaves the factory. Unlike shorter-lived IoT products, replacing embedded hardware across an automotive fleet is rarely a practical response to those changes.

Kigen is addressing that issue with a new Automotive eSIM that the company says is the first GSMA eUICC Security Assurance (eSA)-certified automotive eSIM to support SGP.32 v1.3, the latest version of the GSMA’s IoT eSIM specification.

The implementation combines Kigen’s eSIM operating system with Infineon’s TEGRION SLI22 automotive security controller. It is intended for connected-vehicle OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers developing telematics and other embedded connectivity systems with long operational lifetimes.

SGP.32 moves deeper into automotive connectivity

Much of the industry activity around SGP.32 has so far focused on remote profile orchestration: enabling enterprises and OEMs to download or change mobile network profiles without physically replacing SIMs. Kigen’s announcement is different because it places the latest SGP.32 functionality within an eUICC platform that has also undergone the GSMA’s eSA security evaluation.

SGP.32 v1.3, published in May 2026, adds capabilities including direct and indirect profile downloads, digital activation codes and emergency profile handling. The latter is particularly relevant to connected vehicles, where maintaining access to a usable connectivity profile can be more consequential than in many conventional IoT deployments.

For automotive manufacturers, the broader implication is that remote SIM provisioning increasingly needs to be considered as part of the vehicle’s lifecycle architecture rather than simply as a mechanism for selecting an operator at production. Connectivity agreements, roaming arrangements and available networks can all change during a vehicle’s service life, while the embedded connectivity hardware may remain unchanged.

A common platform across vehicle and IoT systems

Kigen’s automotive implementation is part of a wider portfolio based on Infineon’s TEGRION SLx22 family. The automotive SLI22 variant sits alongside the SLC22 for consumer applications and the SLM22 for industrial IoT applications.

According to Kigen, the products share the same operating system, hardware platform, development tools and management stack. For manufacturers working across connected cars, commercial vehicles and other embedded IoT systems, that common architecture could reduce the number of separate eSIM environments engineering teams need to integrate and maintain.

This is potentially more significant than the certification itself. Automotive connectivity increasingly overlaps with the wider IoT ecosystem: the same manufacturer may need to manage telematics control units, infotainment systems, headless embedded devices and connected commercial fleets. Reusing security and provisioning components across those environments can simplify qualification and lifecycle management without requiring every device category to use the same connectivity configuration.

Preparing for security requirements beyond today’s specifications

Kigen is also positioning the platform for longer-term cryptographic changes. Post-quantum cryptography is not currently part of the GSMA SGP.32 specification, but the company says its implementation supports hybrid key encapsulation combining classical and quantum-safe algorithms. OEMs can test end-to-end communications using Kigen’s C-SDK development environment and eSIM samples.

That capability should be viewed as preparation rather than current SGP.32 functionality. Its relevance nevertheless reflects an automotive-specific constraint: vehicles designed today may remain deployed long enough for their original cryptographic assumptions to change, while replacing the underlying connectivity hardware across an installed fleet would be costly and operationally complex.

Kigen says its Automotive eSIMs currently interoperate with more than 20 network providers ready for digital activation and with more than 60 IoT modules in its ecosystem. The company plans to participate in GSMA interoperability testing in October 2026 and expects automotive eSIM samples in the ETSI MFF2 package to become available to OEMs from October.

For vehicle OEMs and connectivity providers, the announcement illustrates how SGP.32 is moving beyond remote operator switching toward a broader lifecycle architecture in which provisioning flexibility, hardware security and long-term maintainability increasingly have to be designed together.

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