By Manuel Nau, Lead Editor at IoT Business News.
Kigen has got it GSMA eUICC Security Assurance Certification to support automotive eSIM SGP.32 v1.3combines remote connectivity management with a security architecture designed for connected vehicles that can remain operational for more than ten years.
Connected vehicles create a particularly difficult lifecycle problem for mobile IoT. The telematics architecture chosen during vehicle development still needs to support network changes, new connectivity providers and evolving security requirements years after the vehicle leaves the factory. Unlike IoT products with shorter lifespans, replacing hardware installed in automotive fleets is rarely a practical response to these changes.
Kigen addresses these issues with a new Automotive eSIM that the company calls GSMA eUICC Security Assurance (eSA)—the first automotive eSIM certified to support SGP.32 v1.3, the latest version of 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 been focused on remote profile orchestration: enabling Enterprises and OEMs to download or change mobile network profiles without physically changing the SIM. Kigen’s announcement is different because it places the latest SGP.32 functionality on the eUICC platform which has also undergone 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 working connectivity profile can be more important than in many conventional IoT deployments.
For automotive manufacturers, the wider implication is that remote SIM provisioning should be considered part of the vehicle’s lifecycle architecture rather than simply a mechanism to select carriers in production. Connectivity agreements, roaming arrangements and available networks can all change during the vehicle’s service life, while the installed connectivity hardware can remain unchanged.
A common platform between 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 next to 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 on connected cars, commercial vehicles and other embedded IoT systems, such a common architecture can reduce the number of separate eSIM environment engineering teams need to integrate and maintain.
This is potentially more important 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 devices and connected commercial fleets. Reusing security and provisioning components in these environments can simplify qualification and lifecycle management without requiring each category of device to use the same connectivity configuration.
Prepare security requirements beyond current specifications
Kigen also provides a platform for long-term cryptographic change. Post-quantum cryptography is not currently part of the GSMA SGP.32 specification, but the company says its implementation supports hybrid key encapsulation that combines classical and quantum-secure algorithms. OEMs can test end-to-end communication using Kigen’s C-SDK development environment and eSIM samples.
These capabilities should be viewed as preparations rather than functions of the current SGP.32. But its relevance reflects an automotive-specific constraint: vehicles designed today may be in use long enough for the original cryptographic assumptions to change, while replacing the underlying connectivity hardware in an installed fleet would be costly and operational.
Kigen said that eSIM Automotive now interoperates with more than 20 network providers ready for digital activation and more than 60 IoT modules in its ecosystem. The company plans to participate in GSMA’s interoperability trials in October 2026 and expects automotive eSIM samples in the ETSI MFF2 package to be available to OEMs from October.
For vehicle OEMs and connectivity providers, the announcement illustrates how SGP.32 moves beyond the remote operator switching to a broader lifecycle architecture in which flexibility provisioning, hardware security and long-term maintainability should be designed together.