On July 3, 2023 Prof. Mike Schwarz from the EDS Germany Chapter and Prof. Ulrich Birkel organized a lecture entitled “Fundamentals of Security Practical Case: Secure Boot of processors”. 33 participants attended the lecture, which was given by Rodrigue Simonneaui, MX FAE from NXP Semiconductors.

Mr. Simonneau started with an introduction and explained the pillars of security. Afterwards, he went through “Building blocks for HW backed security” and offered boundaries with focus on how to compare all hardware enabling depth security components before he target the topic of “Security Architecture across i.MX Processors Family”. In here he gave insights in the i.MX series 6, 7, and 8 and the architecture and devices and how security is enabled at different levels. Afterwards, he move forward to the latest i.MX 93 architecture including RISC-V topology and referred to security enclave aspects.

The secure boot example enabled the students to acquire some processor security fundamentals, illustrated at the end by a live demo. The i.MX93 could first boot a simple signed image, which was in a second step manipulated at the binary level by Mr. Simonneau. The device protected here by mean of ECC signing was able to detect that the imagehas been tampered and thus declined to boot.

Afterwards, the students had the opportunity to ask detailed questions and there were a lot, emphasized by the great demo. The lecture ended after approx. 90 minutes with some conclusions and thanks for the chance to have an experienced engineer of NXP at THM.

Mr. Rodrigue Simonneau explaining the pillars of security.