Author:
Hristo Koshutanski, Project Coordinator, ATOS
Dear Readers and IoT Security Technologists,
As in each journey, we have come to the final completion of our mission of CROSSCON - the design and delivery of a secure and interoperable IoT stack for connected devices, modular vendor-agnostic cross-platform security with innovative HW/SW codesign for even stronger security assurance and isolation.
I'd like to emphasize on the differentiation factor of CROSSCON from the majority of EU projects I've come across - the delivery of innovative technology, that actually works, to the IoT security community, and the generation of domain expert knowledge in the field.
First of all, a great recognition for the CROSSCON team - a highly qualified and capable team of experts from HW to SW security, from security assurance and testing to formal verification, from renown academic profiles to innovative SMEs in the sector along a big industry player. This is the first lesson that proved as the right formula - focused and agile consortium - to move decisively from knowhow generation to technological development and maturation towards market readiness.
The second lesson learned, what the project mostly shines, is its contribution to the IoT community in terms of actual technology delivery, very few projects can be proud of. We have created a number of exploitation results, very ambitious and challenging in nature, available at our GitHub repo which I kindly invite you to visit: https://github.com/crosscon.
You can find key IoT device security artefacts such as the CROSSCON Hypervisor, bare-metal TEE, trusted services for second factor device authentication, the RISC-V based CROSSCON SoC, FPGA TEE-like provisioning, and so on.
Common to all projects but always challenging to demonstrate are the use cases, the third lesson learned. CROSSCON designed a reproducible testbed, local on premise and central at scale, for demonstration and validation of its results in multi-IoT device scenarios. We achieved ambitious and challenging use case demonstrations on how the project results enable strong security for:
i) Device multi-factor authentication,
ii) Firmware updates,
iii) Commissioning and decommissioning of IoT devices,
iv) Remote attestation for agricultural UAVs, and
v) IP Protection for multi-tenancy on FPGA.
Kindly visit the press release https://crosscon.eu/dissemination-material/third-press-release-october-2025.
A total of 17 demonstrations of the CROSSCON technology, some of those reproducible and available on the project GitHub.
Finally, impact creation is an ultimate aim of the project, coupled with ambitious and well-crafted KPIs, the fourth lesson learned. In fact, impact creation is a multi-dimensional activity, which we believe CROSSCON did an extraordinary work, across industrial awareness events such as Embedded World and RISC-V Summit their 2023 to 2025 editions, as well as across synergies and collaborations with 16 EU-funded projects including joint white papers and events, such as the event "CROSSCON & (Secure) Friends" collocated at RISC-V Summit Europe 2024. In terms of scientific and dissemination impact, CROSSCON achieved 44 scientific publications including top conferences and journals, contributed to a total of 55 events including academic and industrial events, PhD summer schools co-organisation, cluster meetings, training sessions and workshops, to name a few. A number of blogposts and newsletters were produced on various CROSSCON topics to boost community awareness. It is worth highlighting the joint contribution between UMINHO and BEYOND on a novel TEE solution for next-generation RISC-V MCUs that was promoted to standard RISC-V specification.
We are grateful for the excellence and commitment of the CROSSCON advisory board in positioning and shaping the final outreach results.
We sincerely encourage you to visit the web site for latest details of the CROSSCON impact generation.
We are looking forward to opportunities in maturing and extending the CROSSCON results toward technology readiness level suitable for market presentation.
Feel free to contact us for any such collaboration and opportunity.
Respectfully,
Hristo Koshutanski
Project Coordinator