PROACT - Physical Attack Resistance of Cryptographic Algorithms and Circuits with Reduced Time to Market
Modern societies are connected via electronic and mobile devices that we call the Internet of Things (IoT). If proper protection mechanisms are not in place, there is a real risk of breaches of privacy and financial damage. The aim of PROACT is to design new algorithms and silicon chips with built-in protection mechanisms to combat physical attacks, and to develop new simulation and evaluation techniques for physical protection. PROACT will contribute to raising the level of security of our personal and business-sensitive data.
Project pagePREDATOR - Predicting hardware vulnerabilities during design phase
Given the threat of side-channel analysis (SCA), leakage assessment of a chip is very important for society and has accordingly received a lot of attention in the past years. A significant number of studies show how to recover secrets by measuring the chip's power consumption, electronic emanations or execution time or by actively interacting with it through fault analysis (FA). Security vulnerabilities in implementations are a significant concern since it is costly to patch a vulnerable chip once it is fabricated and deployed in the field. This project investigates how to efficiently predict hardware vulnerabilities during the pre-silicon manufacturing stage.
BASES - Bio-inspired Advanced Security Testing for Embedded Systems
Public-key cryptography is vulnerable to mathematical attacks by quantum computers. Governments are encouraging organizations to use new post-quantum cryptography algorithms to secure critical infrastructure. However, these new algorithms are still susceptible to physical attacks, whereas current test infrastructures to assess their resistance to physical attacks sacrifice quality for duration. This project investigates new methods inspired by genomics (to improve quality) in combination with digital hardware design (to shorten the runtime) to thoroughly evaluate the security of post-quantum-secure deployments against deep-learning-based side-channel analysis.
Challenges in CyberSecurity
Cybersecurity is often portrayed as an educational problem or a lack of resources, with the blame placed on users, system administrators or budget holders who limit system management options. However, many difficult problems remain unsolved and their resolution requires coordinated scientific research. The “Challenges in Cyber Security” project brings together top researchers from hard science in the cybersecurity field to solve these difficult open problems.