35th Chaos Communication Congress: PHYSEC presents details on the application of their technology

At the 35th annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club (35C3), the largest international hacker meeting in Europe, Christian Zenger, David Holin and Lars Steinschulte presented PHYSEC’s Enclosure-PUF technology.

This year’s Chaos Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Con­gress attract­ed more than 16,000 vis­i­tors to the exhi­bi­tion halls in Leipzig on three days. Under the mot­to “Refresh­ing Mem­o­ries” it was the venue for impor­tant debates, lec­tures and work­shops on tech­ni­cal and socio-polit­i­cal top­ics.

It was the first time that we gave insights into the PHYSEC tech­nol­o­gy. With Enclo­sure-PUF we pre­sent­ed an inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­o­gy that makes it pos­si­ble to ver­i­fy the authen­tic­i­ty, integri­ty and phys­i­cal state of a phys­i­cal object and to prove cor­re­spond­ing state­ments via dig­i­tal chan­nels.

In pub­lic envi­ron­ments, data extrac­tion from or manip­u­la­tion of com­put­er sys­tems is easy to per­form as it requires only phys­i­cal access. The aim of the talk was there­fore to demon­strate exem­plary tam­per resis­tance by means of a (very inex­pen­sive) self-built test bed in order to pro­tect secret infor­ma­tion with­out attack detec­tion or data era­sure cir­cuit. The use of elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves (or their prop­a­ga­tion behav­iour) enables the pro­tec­tion of indi­vid­ual small com­po­nents to be extend­ed to the entire periph­ery of a sys­tem. This in turn leads to the detec­tion of manip­u­la­tions so that suit­able coun­ter­mea­sures can be tak­en in good time. The pro­tec­tion can be used flex­i­bly with regard to size and appli­ca­tion.

In 2018, we were award­ed the Ger­man IT Secu­ri­ty Prize of the Horst Görtz Foun­da­tion for the devel­op­ment of the Enclo­sure PUF.

David Holin, Lars Steinschulte and Christian Zenger (f.l.t.r.) from PHYSEC during the talk at the 35C3 in Leipzig

Missed the talk? Click here for the record­ing.