Consortium

TalTech, the only technological university in Estonia, is the flagship of Estonian engineering and technology education. With its 11,000 students and 1,900 staff members, the university is an internationally recognized research institution which is actively responding to the rapidly developing society, tackling the challenges of the digital era. TalTech is cooperating with world leading technology companies and universities and is in charge of nurturing the next generation of engineers and advancing engineering culture in Estonia, contributing to the sustainable development of the society and increased national prosperity with its innovative services. Around 20% of the students at TalTech study in the field of ICT. The TalTech campus is also a home to more than 200 high-tech companies. Since 2013, TalTech has consistently ranked first amongst the Baltic universities in the QS World University Rankings. However, the overall rank (~500th800th) is still far from the leading Western European universities. The unit involved in the SAFEST project is Department of Computer Systems (DCS) of TalTech. DCS has 70 employees, including 8 professors, 10+ senior faculty members, and 20+ PhD students. During the last 15 years, DCS has participated in a number of EUfunded networking and research projects, including H2020/FP7 RIA, Twinning and MSCA ITN actions. In a recent evaluation of Estonian ICT research groups performed by an international jury, DCS achieved the highest grades both for the level of research as well as for international cooperation.

CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) is the French state research organisation and is the largestfundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers. The unit involved in SAFEST is LIRMM, a joint unit of the University of Montpellier and the CNRS. Its research activities revolve around modelling and designing various hardware and software systems, as well as research on algorithms, bioinformatics, databases and artificial intelligence. The unit brings together over 400 professionals, including professors, postdoctoral fellows and around 150 PhD candidates. On average, the unit produces yearly around 350 scientific publications, including 25 doctoral theses and 170 articles in international journals or seminars. Within LIRMM, the unit involved in the SAFEST project is the Microelectronics Department, especially the TEST Team. The Microelectronics Department has 76 employees, including a permanent staff of 31 professors/researchers, engineers, PhDs and postdoctoral fellows. The Department specializes in the research of innovative Design and Test of integrated electronic systems, including related hardware security concerns (scan chain attacks, hardware Trojans, IP piracy and counterfeiting). The TEST Team has participated in numerous national and European Projects (Eureka, ENIAC, EU COST Action, PENTA, etc.) related to test and/or security activities.

TUM is one of Europe’s top universities. It is committed to excellence in research and teaching, interdisciplinary education and the active promotion of promising young scientists. The university also forges strong links with companies and scientific institutions across the world. TUM was one of the first universities in Germany to be named a University of Excellence. Moreover, TUM regularly ranks among the best European universities in international rankings. TUM’s 15 departments provide an excellent environment for research and for the education of 42,000 students, 37% of them women. The university has a budget of EUR 1,552.5 million, which includes the university hospital. The Chair of Security in Information Technology is the unit involved in the SAFEST project. Founded in 2010 and headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Georg Sigl, the Chair’s mission is the development of secure embedded systems. The Chair’s focus is on the implementation of security primitives, protection against hardware related attacks, side channel weaknesses, fault attacks, as well as implementation of hardware cryptographic accelerators. TUM has been involved in more than a dozen funded projects related to Hardware Security since the inception of the Security chair.

KU Leuven is one of Europe’s oldest universities, boasting a long tradition of ground-breaking research and high-quality education. With its 50,000 students, KU Leuven is consistently ranked as a top university, being recently ranked the seventh most innovative university worldwide by Reuters. The Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) group is the unit involved in this project. COSIC was founded in 1979 and currently has 7 professors, 6 members of support staff, 8 research experts/managers, and over 60 researchers. COSIC is part of the Department of Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven. Staff from COSIC has created the global AES standard for encryption, the most popular block cypher in the world. During the last 15 years, COSIC obtained more than 1200 international reviewed publications in journals and conferences, 13 edited books, 10 patents, and has graduated over 60 PhD students.

TU Graz is one of Austria’s leading polytechnical universities. The Department of Computer Science is well known for its activities in areas such as Knowledge Management, Computer Graphics, Security, and Design of Reliable Systems. The department consists of eight institutes. The Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK) is the unit involved in this project; it focuses on information security and adjacent domains. Roughly 60 employees at IAIK conduct research, teach students, and provide consultancy for private and public organizations. IAIK researches information security in a broad context: Researchers work in the areas of cryptography, e-government, trusted computing, secure hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms, side-channel analysis, and formal methods for design and verification.