CROSSCON: interoperable IoT security stack for embedded connected devices

Abstract

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) embedded devices is estimated to reach 30 billion by 2030, leading to a highly dynamic landscape where distinct devices have to coexist. The rapid proliferation of different architectures and platforms requires a unified solution that can be supported by different devices, while providing a wide range of services to cope with the ongoing challenges of connecting devices to the Internet. CROSSCON, a 3-year Research and Innovation Action funded under Horizon Europe, aims to address these challenges by designing a new open, modular, highly portable, and vendor-independent IoT security stack that can run on various devices using heterogeneous embedded hardware architectures, such as ARM and RISC-V. At this stage of development, CROSSCON already specifies a unified level of abstraction, encompassing several components across multiple heterogeneous hardware platforms. It currently supports a bare-metal TEE for constrained devices, and novel security features provided by the CROSSCON hypervisor, such as per-VM TEE and Dynamic VM creation.