CROSSCON: interoperable IoT Security Stack - the RISC-V opportunity

Abstract

CROSSCON is a 3-year, multi-million euro, Research and Innovation Action funded under Horizon Europe. The project aims to design a new open, modular, highly portable, and vendor-independent IoT security stack that can run on various devices using heterogeneous hardware architectures, including RISC-V. The Consortium sees in RISC-V a two-fold opportunity. Firstly, by aiming to develop an interoperable reference security stack, we believe we can contribute to the expected specifications of ongoing initiatives for Trusted Execution and Confidential Computing on Application processors (i.e., CoVE) and microcontrollers. Secondly, RISC-V offers a unique opportunity to develop novel security hardware extensions for software services, either by creating extensions directly to the ISA or developing non-ISA hardware mechanisms that support the efficient implementation of security guarantees at the application level.