A patent pending solution/microchip for the IoT cybersecurity market requirements: no access to online software updates, very small size, inexpensive hardware, low energy consumption.

Project Information

TFence

Grant agreement ID: 781623

DOI

10.3030/781623

Project closed

EC signature date 20 September 2017

Start date 1 August 2017

End date 30 November 2017

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

TERAFENCE LTD
Israel

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TFence (A patent pending solution/microchip for the IoT cybersecurity market requirements: no access toonline software updates, very small size, inexpensive hardware, low energy consumption.)

Reporting period: 2017-08-01 to 2017-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

High-tech and critical systems, such as medical devices, implants and IoT devices are vulnerable. Penetration of medical devices would have a devastating impact, including substantial economic damage, injury and loss of life. Similarly, Penetration of IoT in the industry would cause large economic damage. Current solutions are clunky, expensive and do not fit the large variety of small medical devices, wearables and IoT appliances.
Terafence is developing a state-of-the-art hardware silicon solution/FPGA/Chip based device, TFence, for cyber-secured connectivity (patent pending) based on unidirectional net flow from and to IoT devices and networks of IoT devices.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Overall, Phase 1 provided time and resources to understand the technical and business viability of TFence. In particular, following aspects were assessed and provided valuable insights:
• TFence is the only one to addresses all 7 seven layers of security and will be the only feasible solution for medical and industrial applications;
• The Value Proposition and the use cases of TFence were refined – based on that, the industrial and the medical segments were again confirmed as most attractive business opportunities;
• Terafence is in discussion with many potential stakeholders to be involved in the product development plan. The Phase 2 technical objectives were defined to be validated again during further stages and a total budget of around €2M was quantified;
• The company prepared an industrialization and a business scale up plan, in which contract manufacturing is going to be crucial;
• A comprehensive user market research and a study on relevant regulations and standards, such as GDPR and ISO were performed;
• Terafence identified customers (i.e. resellers and OEMs), who are potential to reach the user market and commercialize TFence;
• The future business model was validated, as well as SWOT analysis and the analysis of market barriers was performed;
• Financial projections were prepared, based on the business upscale plan.
Overall, Phase 1 provided time and resources to research the market, and better understand the use cases of the TFence solution. Also, dozens of discussions took place with potential stakeholders, based on which Terafence was able to better define the objectives and the next steps. In summary, Phase 1 convinced the management of Terafence to further pursue the idea and to prepare next steps towards the product development, to be conducted with the help of Phase 2 of the Horizon 2020 grant scheme.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The expected outcome of the project is to engineer and build TFence IoT gateway hardware and software. Then the solution needs to be built into a board that will be ready for large scale manufacturing. At the same time TFence will be tested, optimized, validated and certified.
TFence is a game changer to make state-of-art technologies 100% secure. Such solution will provide a guarantee to medical implantable, wearables and emerging IoT applications. The magnitude of the impact that can be contributed to TFence is around € multibillions

Terafence data direction engine card