SESAM teamSystèmes Embarqués Sécurisés et Architectures Matérielles

Secure Embedded Systems & Hardware Architectures

In recent years, there has been a shift and a blurring of boundaries between the areas of security-critical embedded systems (e.g. aviation, military, banking, and energy) and areas of "quality of service" embedded systems (e.g. the smart home, consumer electronics, commerce, multimedia, e-health, and the smart grid). Reliability requirements and strong security that were previously limited to the above mentioned areas will gradually extend to all areas of embedded systems. As a result, hardware security has become a hot topic. Hardware security concerns different fields: data security (confidentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation), system security (user authentication, guaranteed quality of services, the war against malicious hardware) and the protection of intellectual property (IP protection, the war against counterfeiting, illegal copying and theft).

The SESAM team of the Hubert Curien Lab explores four main aspects of hardware security:

• the random number generation and physical unclonable function implementation in logic devices,
• the design of hardware architectures resistant to passive and active cryptographic attacks,
• the secure implementations of post-quantum schemes,
• the security of systems on chip (SoC).