If you are designing electronics to go into a satellite or a military drone, it better have a useful lifetime of 15-20 years or more. Ditto for the grid or other critical infrastructure, your car, medical devices, anything where we demand absolute reliability. Reliability also requires countermeasures against hacking by anyone… Read More
Most methods of securing SOCs involve storing a root key that provides the basis of all derived keys and encryption of communication. The weakness with these methods is that even if the root key is stored in secure non-volatile memory, there are often methods to read the key. Once a key has been divulged the device can be cloned and … Read More
In our daily lives, few of us if any, would want randomness to play any role. We look for predictability in order to plan our lives. But reality is that random numbers have been playing a role in our lives for a long time. The more conspicuous use cases of random numbers are with key fobs, and nowadays mobile phones. And then there are a … Read More
There is never a dearth of new terms, discoveries and inventions in the technological world. And sometimes existing terms get reinvigorated. And debates ensue. The debaters argue about the plusses and minuses and make some predictions. Such is the case with “Quantum Computing.” I recently watched and listened to a webinar that… Read More
Throughout history, people have sought after security as a basic right and expectation within a civilized society. Even as recent as a few centuries ago, things were very simple. Subjects looked to their rulers to provide security for their lives and assets. Assets were mostly hard assets such as jewelry, coins or real estate. … Read More
I’ve had a number of enjoyable discussions with John East who ran Actel until it was acquired. (John and Actel devices also play an important role in my book, The Tell-Tale Entrepreneur.) This is relevant because Actel were well-known for their anti-fuse FPGAs. eMemory Technology, the subject of this blog, also produce an anti-fuse… Read More
Anyone knows that the best way to keep a secret is never to share it with anyone. Which works fine for your own most personal secrets, but it’s not very useful when you have to share with at least one other, such as in cyber-security. One such need, of enormous importance in the IoT, is authentication; are you who you claim to be? Seas of… Read More
Security and machine learning (ML) are among the hottest areas in tech, especially for the IoT. The need for higher security is, or should be, blindingly obvious at this point. We struggle to fend off daily attacks even in our mainstream compute and networking environment. How defenseless will we be when we have billions of devices… Read More
Unique device identities are at the core of all computer security systems. Just as important is that each unique identity cannot be copied, because once copied they can be used illegitimately. Unique device IDs are used to ensure that communications are directed to the correct device. And they also provide the ability to encrypt… Read More
