Riscure announces its collaboration with Radboud University to work on a research project aimed to advance the knowledge of pre-silicon security. The project is funded by the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO) under the Open Technology Programme and is named ‘Predator’. The goal of this development is to further enhance the prediction of hardware vulnerabilities during the design stage of a chip.
Riscure will contribute its existing knowledge and capability in pre-silicon security expertise. Pre-silicon is an important concept that allows hardware developers to identify potential security weaknesses during design. This capability is aimed to improve the overall hardware security robustness, as serious issues are uncovered and eliminated before production, thus saving time and money and avoiding costly redevelopments and recalls. Riscure’s pre-silicon expertise has been implemented in Inspector Pre-Silicon, a solution designed to uncover potential weak spots of a chip that are susceptible to a Side Channel attack.
Durga Lakshmi Ramachandran, Innovation Director at Riscure, commented: “At Riscure we strive to offer the latest security knowledge to our customers. In device security field this means both perfecting the existing security concepts and innovating in order to stay ahead of attackers. Our collaboration with an experienced team at Radboud enables us to share existing knowledge, improve the overall state of security and learn something from academia”.
Lejla Batina and Ileana Buhan, Radboud University, commented: “We have a long-standing collaboration with Riscure and the project will benefit from the complementary knowledge that both teams bring to this project. The aim of PREDATOR is to provide the semiconductor and security evaluation industry with a set of metrics and tools to aid analysis and mitigate hardware security vulnerabilities”.
The ‘Predator’ project will ‘shift left’ more side channel testing methods, now used to evaluate physical chips and devices, making similar results available during design stage. The results of this joint research as expected to be delivered in 2026.