RESCURE: Retrofit Security for Critical infrastructures

RESCURE is a follow-up of the successful EUROSTARS project PATRIOT (E!9629, 2015-2017). PATRIOT supported Intrinsic ID’s and TEC’s strategic move towards the IoT market with respect to strong authentication scheme and secure key storage. Thanks to the work in PATRIOT, Intrinsic-ID has closed deals with major semiconductor companies. While PATRIOT aimed to develop a secure two-factor authentication protocol focused on small scale IoT deployment, RESCURE targets the security retrofit of the protocols and system itself as well as the resistance to physical attacks.RESCURE is a joint project between TU/e, Intrinsic ID and Technikon. The TU/e research for the project focuses on multiple enrollment systems, entropy analysis, and debiasing of the SRAM PUF.The focus of RESCURE has been on retrofitting of existing device’s security by means of SRAM-based PUF (Physically Unclonable Functions) used in critical infrastructures. During the project a prototype was developed that demonstrates secure bootloader, secure over-the-air update and end-to-end encryption. Furthermore, the research work has resulted in a new multiple observations helper data scheme that can generate a single helper data sequence based on multiple SRAM-PUF observations. A demonstration of the scheme was implemented in MATLAB (see figure).

RESCURE retrofits security in large scale IoT Critical Infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, within RESCURE, we aim to deliver a low-cost IoT security solution based on a patented SRAM-PUF technology, which provides secure storage and root-of-trust.

This research project was completed in April 2020.