Pim Tuyls: IoT Security, Technology Scaling, and Quantum Threats

The EE Times C-Suite Interview Series

By Nitin Dahad, EETimes (July 7, 2021)

Most executives we talk to about internet of things (IoT) security emphasize similar points: the need for a strong root of trust, proper authentication mechanisms, and resilience. However, there are many different ways of enabling the various aspects of this security. One company focused on physical unclonable function (PUF) based security intellectual property is Intrinsic ID.

We caught up with CEO and a founder of Intrinsic ID, Pim Tuyls, to understand more about the world of PUF security, the challenges for IoT security as technology scales, and how to deal with the potential impact of other threats including quantum computing.

Pim Tuyls co-founded the company in 2008 as a spinout from Philips Research. While working as a principal scientist managing the cryptography cluster at Philips, he initiated the original work on physical PUFs that forms the basis of the Intrinsic ID core technology. As a result of over 20 years working on semiconductors and security, Pim is widely recognized for his work in the field of SRAM PUFs and security for embedded applications.

He speaks regularly at technical conferences and has written extensively on the subject of security. He co-wrote the book Security with Noisy Data, which examines new technologies in the field of security based on noisy data and describes applications in the fields of biometrics, secure key storage, and anti-counterfeiting. Pim holds a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Leuven University and has more than 50 patents.

Tuyls said his team of around 30 people has a lot of experience in implementing PUF in many different situations. He emphasized in our interview that a major differentiator for Intrinsic ID’s solution is that “there are no key secrets at rest.”

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