Fall 2021 Newsletter

We have come to the final quarter of what has been a great year for Intrinsic ID. Despite the ongoing pandemic, we have been able to sign up some of the biggest tech companies in the world as customers, who are equipping their chips or devices in leading-edge technology nodes with our SRAM PUF technology. These successes have allowed us to further strengthen our position as the world’s leading PUF technology provider and we are now about to cross the mark of 300 million devices deployed with our technology. But there is much more for us to be excited about:

• A recent study has shown that billions of IoT devices are equipped with no or faulty randomness generators, which allow their cryptography to be broken. To resolve this issue of having insufficient randomness, Intrinsic ID has launched a new product in Q3 of 2021 called Zign™ RNG. With Zign RNG anyone can add a NIST-certified random number generator to their devices by merely adding this software solution that uses standard SRAM as its entropy source.
• We are excited to announce our partnership with Rambus, a leader in Root of Trust solutions. This partnership will help our mutual customers ease the integration burden for combining our SRAM PUF technology with solutions from Rambus.
• Finally, we are very much looking forward to being able to meet you all face to face again, after this long period with few in-person events. That is why we are happy to announce that we will have a booth at CES 2022 in January. We hope to see many of you there and to kick off 2022 in style together!

You can find more information about all these topics (and several more) in this newsletter. Enjoy this content and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or want to connect.

Stay safe and stay healthy!
Pim Tuyls – CEO, Intrinsic ID

Press Release
Intrinsic ID Announces NIST-Certified Software Random Number Generator (Zign RNG) for IoT Devices

Intrinsic ID announces Zign™ RNG, a new offering enabling IoT chip providers and device makers to establish a high-security random number generator in software enabling it to be deployed on devices even after silicon fabrication to ensure a true source of randomness for IoT devices. Zign RNG is the industry’s first and only embedded RNG software solution; it ensures a source of true randomness addressing a critical flaw affecting the trustworthiness of billions of IoT devices.

“The approach of Zign RNG offers us a cost-effective way to generate true randomness on devices with limited resources by utilizing something that is already present, the SRAM. It has proven to provide our devices with the entropy that is needed to build our security solutions on,” Sean McGrath, Senior VP and General Manager, Connectivity and Audio Business Group at Dialog Semiconductor, a Renesas Company and early adopter of Zign RNG.

Press Release
Intrinsic ID and Rambus Raise the Bar for Hardware Security with Integration of PUF Technology and Rambus Root of Trust

Intrinsic ID announces the availability of integrated solutions that combine the Intrinsic ID PUF technology with Rambus Root of Trust security cores. Customers will now be able to seamlessly implement the Intrinsic ID QuiddiKey® hardware IP with Rambus Root of Trust Solutions to ensure broader coverage of both data and hardware security in their chip designs.

“As more companies look to add PUF technology to their secure hardware architecture, we are very pleased to offer easy-to-integrate solutions that combine Intrinsic ID’s PUF IP with our Root of Trust security cores,” said Neeraj Paliwal, general manager of Security IP at Rambus.

Event
Intrinsic ID Exhibiting at EU-EIC Pavilion during CES 2022
In January 2022, Intrinsic ID will be attending CES in Las Vegas again, this time as an exhibitor at the EU-EIC Pavilion. This means that we are part of the delegation selected by the European Innovation Council (EIC). The EIC has chosen 20 companies from Europe to exhibit at CES in the EU Pavilion in the Venetian Expo. Being selected for this pavilion is great recognition for Intrinsic ID and for the vital roles security and authentication are playing in consumer electronics since the advent of IoT. If you are planning to attend CES 2022 you can reach out to marketing@intrinsic-id.com to schedule a meeting with us.

Webinar on Demand
SHIELDS UP! S2 Episode 6: What is a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) and What Can I Do With It?
PUFs are security elements that provide unique benefits when building secure systems. During this SHIELDS UP! session on November 17, 2021, Microchip and Intrinsic ID described what a PUF is, what makes it an excellent choice for your design, what you can do with PUFs, the different types of PUFs that exist, and why you need more than one.

Webinar on Demand
Key Trends Impacting Automotive Security Today and in the Future

With every vehicle becoming a connected IoT device, the automotive industry is facing new security challenges. Standardization efforts, technology scaling and quantum computing are key trends that will have major impact on security – today and in the future. In a highly standardized market, which new standards are required to guarantee security? How will hardware-based security scale to the large volume of low-cost chips when every chip in a vehicle needs protection? And looking to future challenges: is there a threat posed to automotive security by quantum computing? This session covered these trends and how to prepare for them.

This webinar was part of the Automotive Security track of the IoT Device Security Conference on November 9th. You can still watch this presentation by our CEO Pim Tuyls using this link.

PUF Cafe
Latest PUF Cafe Episode: Using PUFs for Random Number Generation

Typically PUFs are used for creating unclonable identities and storing cryptographic keys, but they can also be a great source of randomness. Given that the availability of entropy is a necessity to create a PUF, it should be possible to use this entropy for “non-PUF” purposes. In this Episode, Nicolas Moro will guide you through the process that is required to turn a PUF into a Random Number Generator (RNG). The steps of this process range from how to harvest the PUF’s entropy all the way to how to get NIST CAVP certification for the resulting RNG.

This PUF Cafe Episode was originally aired on September 29th, but you can still watch it in the PUF Cafe Episodes archive. If you are not a member of PUF Cafe yet, go to the registration page now, sign up for free, and head over to the archive to watch all PUF Cafe Episodes!

Articles
Overview of Recent Articles about Intrinsic ID

Over the last few months several articles have appeared about Intrinsic ID and our PUF technology. Below is an overview of these articles.

Two articles have been published about the previously mentioned product launch of Zign RNG, “Using PUFs for Random Number Generation” on SemiWiki.com and “An Unexpected IoT Problem: Not Enough Randomness” on EE News Europe.

Intrinsic ID has published an op-ed on the website Help Net Security about how a Zero Trust approach helps to secure complex networks comprised of a colorful palette of connected devices: “Network and IoT security in a zero trust security model”

Intrinsic ID’s SRAM PUF technology is used in China in a partnership between Open Security Research and Midea IoT to make Smart Home appliances be safe and trustworthy. You can find the Chinese press release about this partnership here.

And finally, our CEO Pim Tuyls was interviewed by EETimes for their Weekend Edition newsletter. You can find this interview – with some personal questions for Pim – here.