HINT related / relevant projects
HECTOR
The mission of the HECTOR project is to enable stronger European knowledge integration through collaboration among key complementary European security technology and value chain actors, in order to fully unleash and leverage Europe’s security innovation, competitiveness, and leadership potential.
A single flipped bit or a weak random number generator can cause secure systems to fail. The main motivation of this proposal is to close the gap between the mathematical heaven of cryptographic algorithms and their efficient, secure and robust hardware implementations. It requires integrating secure cryptographic primitives such as random number generators (RNGs) and physically uncloneable functions (PUFs), together with physical attack countermeasures. The goal is to study, design and implement RNGs and PUFs with demonstrable entropy guarantees and quality metrics. This includes on-the-fly entropy testing and physical attacks evaluations, which will enable more secure systems and easier certification.
Homepage: https://www.hector-project.technikon.com
MATTHEW
The mission of the MATTHEW project is to enable new applications and services on mobile devices. It will overcome the limitation of current passive NFC transmission technologies by active modulation and offer new ways of exchanging roles from one secure entity like a nanoSIM or a microSD™ card to another with novel security and privacy approaches.
With the increasingly pervasive use in our society of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and many users running several security relevant applications on these devices at the same time, security and privacy challenges outranging those on personal computers arise. In the near future, users are expected to move personal roles and identities between secure entities. Electronic representations of rights associated with such roles will be mobilised and reside on multiple devices.
Secure entities can be:
- a secure element (SE) integrated in a nanoSIM used in smartphones or
- a SE integrated in a microSD™ card used in tablets and smartphones
Since these entities are bound to a singular user, they contain privacy sensitive data. The type of data depends on the application that these security entities are used for. In order to ensure the privacy of the user, MATTHEW investigates privacy-enhancing technologies and how to integrate them into the “multiple roots of trust”-concept in a way that the exchanged privacy-relevant information is reduced to an absolute minimum. Furthermore, this approach ensures that no sensitive data remains in a device after the secure entity has been unplugged.
Homepage: http://www.matthew-project.technikon.com
CODES
In the CODES project novel lightweight cryptographic algorithms and protocols are developed, which will lead to increased security and guarantee that a system is a genuine, non-modified one including its hardware components.
The security of modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) systems relies fundamentally on the integrity of hardware components. This is the case for user identification and authentication as in smartcards, e-Id, e-Passports, e-health devices or for the integrity checking of computers and mobile systems. For many environments, existing hardware protection mechanisms are too costly, while conventional cryptographic and security tools might be subject to hardware attacks. The concern for stronger protection against counterfeiting, tampering and illegitimate operation call for a radically new approach to design and evaluate critical hardware components – an enabling technology that allows unique features in hardware, which can be measured, but not cloned.
