Mitsubishi Electric, Ritsumeikan University and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) today announced the development of a security technology that uses the individual differences of large scale integrations (LSIs) arising during their fabrication to ensure confidentiality and authentication for interconnected devices in the Internet of things (IoT). The new technology helps to reduce security risks for networked devices by protecting embedded programs and preventing spoofing. LSIs make calculations based on internal circuits that dictate output, so LSIs with the same circuits yield the same results when processing the same input.
Intermediate routes to the computation result, however, are different in each LSI, serving as something like a fingerprint, which the new technology uses to generate unique IDs for LSIs with the same circuits. The unique ID cannot be analyzed even by opening the LSI package and examining its insides because the ID appears only while the circuit is running. The embedded program is encrypted so that it can be decrypted and used only in the device that has the LSI with a specified ID. It is also possible to configure devices to connect only with devices that have specified IDs. Mitsubishi Electric will begin applying the technology in its products from April 2016.

