
The spin-off is created through a proper technology transfer path with the goal of exploiting a breakthrough investigation carried out by a research group incorporated in the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria – DEIB.
Considering the computing platforms operating in the Internet-of-Things with emphasis on the ones addressing the edge computing scenarios, the implementation attacks, a.k.a, side-channel attacks (SCAs), recently emerged as a prominent security threat. In particular, such attacks can retrieve critical information, e.g., the secret key of the executed cryptographic primitives, by leveraging the relationship existing between the data been computed and one or more signals produced by the computing platform during the elaboration, i.e., the side-channel signals.
SCAs can affect any computing device in the IoT, allowing to breach into mathematically secure cryptosystems. To this end, any SCA countermeasure must address the threat at the hardware level by changing the microarchitecture of the computing platform in order to destroy the relationship between the computed data and the side-channel signals.
The spin-off develops a portfolio of technologies to analyze e tackle side-channel vulnerabilities in general-purpose computing platforms and hardware accelerators. Considering the potential market of the proposed technologies that virtually includes any computing platform in the IoT and the current active industrial players, the spin-off protected the core of its technologies by the filing of two patents with the TTO of the Politecnico di Milano.
The principal investigator of the project is Dr. Davide Zoni in tight cooperation with prof. William Fornaciari.