Imagination & Intrinsic-ID collaborate on solutions for IoT security

With growing connectivity across nearly every product category from consumer to automotive to industrial and beyond, security is an ever increasing challenge, and the massive amount of smart devices makes it harder to keep track of every single device. The industry needs a more secure and scalable approach towards device authentication, registration and lifecycle management.

Imagination’s OmniShield multi-domain security technology, which takes advantage of hardware virtualisation technology built into its latest IP offerings, enables the creation of multiple secure domains on an SoC. Products that implement this powerful technology can run multiple, unmodified, isolated applications and operating systems independently and securely at the same time on a single, trusted platform. OmniShield-ready MIPS M5150 CPUs are the only MCU-class CPU IP cores built with hardware virtualisation technology.

Intrinsic-ID’s PUF technology, called Hardware Intrinsic Security (HIS), extracts security keys and unique identifiers from the innate physical characteristics of semiconductors. The device-unique physical structure or ‘silicon fingerprint’ can be obtained from standard SRAM circuits, already in virtually all processor designs. With HIS, no keys need to be programmed or stored in the system and no keys are present when the device is off, which provides a high level of protection against hardware attacks.

A system with multiple domains enabled by Imagination’s OmniShield-ready MIPS CPUs, allows for the HIS key extraction and management functions to be implemented securely in software.

Says Jim Nicholas, EVP MIPS Processor IP, Imagination: “PUF technology is an important element of SoC security. Intrinsic-ID’s technology is used widely across governments and other highly secure markets. We’re delighted to bring this efficient technology to the many customers using MIPS M5150 CPUs. Imagination is forging a growing number of partnerships and creating new technologies organically – all to enable our customers to create highly secure products with our OmniShield-ready IP families.”

Pim Tuyls, CEO of Intrinsic-ID, says, “Chip vendors face a growing burden since they are responsible for programming all product keys used for device, user and data authentication. Since Intrinsic-ID’s PUF technology doesn’t require any change on the silicon, it can be deployed widely and inexpensively. Providing the highest security at the lowest cost, it is a natural choice for chip vendors. The multi-domain environment created by Imagination’s OmniShield technology combined with Intrinsic-ID’s PUF technology provides a differentiated security platform addressing challenges from key provisioning and authentication to root of trust and supply chain protection.”