Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SAFEST (Secure and Assured hardware: Facilitating ESTonia’s digital society)
Período documentado: 2022-04-01 hasta 2023-12-31
Hardware Security has been identified as a knowledge gap by several Estonian stakeholders (TalTech itself, Estonian Ministries, local companies, etc.) and contributes to several national strategies, most notably the national Cybersecurity Strategy. Understanding threats and creating assurances that the hardware utilized by the Estonian e-society is trustworthy are key objectives of the project.
Four main objectives have been set for this project:
Objective 1: Strengthen the research capability of TalTech and its partners in the area of Hardware Security
Objective 2: Promote TalTech's competitiveness through sustainable participation in collaborative research efforts
Objective 3: Raise the research profile of TalTech and the partners
Objective 4: Contribute to the safety aspects of e-Estonia
In terms of practical results achieved, these appears as jointly-authored publications of the SAFEST partners. For the purpose of this short report, we will highlight two articles:
- In “Hardware Obfuscation of Digital FIR Filters”, researchers from TalTech and TUM investigated how to protect digital circuits against reverse engineering practices. This work was published as a conference paper in the 25th International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems (DDECS 2022). This work has received a best paper award. An image related to this work is provided, where the reverse engineering view of the many connections of a circuit is given. This type of analysis is performed by both attackers and defenders, albeit with different goals, naturally.
- In “Design Space Exploration of SABER in 65nm ASIC”, researchers from TalTech and TUG investigated how to accelerate cryptographic operations in hardware. This work was published as a conference paper in the Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security (ASHES ’21). Here we highlight that this work is incredibly representative of the spirit of the Twinning collaboration in SAFEST: TalTech provided its expertise in chip design while TUG provided its expertise in security. Together, both partners worked on a chip that serves as a demonstrator of their effort. Furthermore, the cryptographic algorithm utilized in this work (SABER) is currently being considered for standardization, thus showing how relevant and timely the research on this topic is. An image related to this work is provided, where our tiny chip that measures only 1mm x 1mm has been photographed under a microscope.
The most important social impact of the SAFEST project is that a research group specialized in hardware security topics has been started and consolidated at Tallinn University of Technology. This group, led by Prof. Pagliarini, takes the role of consultant for any Estonian stakeholders that have to interface with that domain. Many local companies have already benefited from such consulting opportunities (TESTONICA LAB OÜ, Skudo OÜ, Golbriak Space), as well as the Majandus- ja Kommunikatsiooniministeerium which is the Ministry that coordinates cyber activities in Estonia.
As explicitly stated in the project proposal, our goal is to “put TalTech on the map” of who is who in Hardware Security.