Google launches OpenTitan, an open source security chip design project

Google has partnered with other tech companies to develop and build OpenTitan, a collaborative project to design new open source security chips.

The purpose of the new alliance is to build reliable chip designs for use in data centers, storage devices and computers. They will be open source and transparent, allowing anyone to inspect the internal hardware to find and detect security holes and backdoors.

The project comes at a time when technology giants and governments are increasingly realizing that there are foreign forces trying to penetrate from the supply chain in an effort to take actions. espionage and long-term surveillance.

OpenTitan builds on the success of Google’s own built-in security chip, Titan, which is being used by the company in multi-element security keys and its own Pixel phones. The key to the chip’s success is its root-of-trust technology, which is secured by encryption that the chip won’t be damaged with what it connects to.

Google said that OpenTitan will be operated by LowRisc, a non-profit community, and will rely on partnerships with ETH Zurich, G + D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology and Western Digital to support this project. .

Google said that OpenTitan is designed according to the “platform-agnostic” philosophy to operate the same on many different platforms and will be approved on almost any device or software.

This is not the first project aimed at building security chip designs. The Open Compute Project, powered by Facebook, Intel and Google, was created to open source chip designs for core infrastructure servers in order to achieve greater efficiency in their operations. data centers.

Apple also has its own security chip – Apple T2 with an exclusive custom design. T2 is currently used in the latest MacBooks, to control device security functions and to store user passwords and encryption keys.

Refer to TechCrunch