The project was structured around 6 work packages.
WP1 captured, studied and specified requirements for the work that needed to be performed within the technical work packages:
1) The demonstration scenarios have been refined. This allowed defining the hardware platforms to be developed for the demonstrators as well as the required building blocks from WP2 and WP3.
2) Opportunities, requirements and constraints from the consortium’s commercial partners have been studied in order to try to align developments with exploitation opportunities.
3) A common evaluation platform has been defined and distributed to partners, together with sample firmware and FPGA-designs. It consists in an FPGA-based motherboard with features to ease security characterization, and a set of low-cost daughter modules allowing to evaluate HECTOR primitives implemented in different FPGA families or ASICs.
WP2 focused on TRNG and PUFs. Several candidate principles have been proposed. A set of comparison and evaluation criteria have been defined. Preliminary implementations helped compare and rank the candidates. Selected TRNG and PUF principles together with dedicated embedded tests and post-processing have been designed for both FPGAs and ASICs. Several hick-ups and manufacturing delays (external factors) repeatedly pushed-out silicon availability and forced to limit physical evaluations to FPGA implementations. HECTOR ASIC test chips will still be used and characterized but after the official completion of the project.
WP3 focused on cryptographic algorithms and countermeasures. Since these rely heavily on random numbers (cryptographic keys, random IVs, masking), a first line of research has been to study the effect of non-ideal randomness on cryptography and on the effectiveness of countermeasures. Known-key and related-key attacks have been studied. Matlab scripts to generate standardized sets of degraded random numbers have been developed to test the effect of weak random numbers on commonly used side-channel countermeasures. The second line of research has been focusing on efficient cryptography and countermeasures. The consortium has been very active in the CAESAR authentication encryption competition. Five of the fifteen candidates of the third round of the competition were proposals from consortium members and 3 proposals remain among the 7 finalists. An important improvement in the usage of the sponge construction for Authenticated Encryption has been introduced, easing the interface between a TRNG/PUF, its crypto post-processing and the cryptographic algorithm itself. HECTOR also worked on design-process efficiency with bottom-up and top-down methodologies for design-time evaluation of side-channel protection.
WP4 focused on the development of demonstrators to illustrate how the technical developments from WP2 and WP3 can be combined for relevant applicative use cases. Three demonstrators have been developed: A dedicated, high-throughput random numbers generators, a secure USB storage, as well as a secure messaging system.
WP5 focused on dissemination, communication, exploitation, standardization and training. The project generated 59 articles and publications, participated to 48 conferences and workshops, as well as 12 other dissemination activities (web site, newsletters, etc.). HECTOR also participated to key cryptography and TRNG related standardization efforts and events, most notably the CAESAR authenticated encryption competition and the NIST TRNG workshop.
WP6 has been the project management work package providing the necessary processes and tools and to ensure proper execution.
