Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC) has been launched

I have the honor and pleasure to act as Chief Technologist and Principal Investigator for the  Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC) that has been launched on May 23, 2012:

The semiconductor manufacturer Intel and the Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt
have opened the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC). This institute is the first Intel research center for IT security outside the USA and will be located at the Center for Advanced Security Research in Darmstadt (CASED). Research focuses on the security of embedded systems and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Intel Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Justin Rattner together with Steffen Saebisch, the State Secretary of the Hessian Ministry for Economics, Transport, Urban and Regional Development, and Dr. Manfred Effinger, Chancellor of TU Darmstadt, presented the new institute in the opening ceremony. The institute will be headed by the institute’s director Prof. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, who also holds the System Security chair at the TU Darmstadt, and by Dr. Matthias Schunter from Intel as its chief technologist.

”Modern IT systems have to be equipped with the highest security possible. This is ever more important because modern information and communication technologies are permeating as interdisciplinary technologies all industrial sectors and are thus becoming the motors for economic and social developments”, says Steffen Saebisch. “This transfer to products and processes is very important to us. The Hessian Ministry of Economy therefore supports the institute’s transfer activities with EU structural funds amounting to a total of 180,000 Euro over the next 3 years“.

The institute is already part of Intel’s new research strategy as of today: A worldwide network of academic research cooperations, the Intel Collaborative Research Institutes (ICRI). The ICRI program is based on the successful U.S.-based Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs), and will bring together experts from academia and industry to help explore and invent in the next generation of technologies that could impact the lives of many in the future. “Forming a multidisciplinary community of Intel, faculty and graduate student researchers from around the world will lead to fundamental breakthroughs in some of the most difficult and vexing areas of computing technology.”, said Intel CTO Justin Rattner.

“The Future IT technology will be one in which many hidden processors will provide users over a distributed operating system, a sort of “Super-Cloud”, with various services and business models: from the ’cloud of devices‘ up to car-to-x communication“, says the institute’s director Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi. „In Darmstadt Intel’s scientists and we will be looking for new for new ways to improve significantly the reliability of mobile devices, embedded systems and connected ecosystems“.

Intel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt will explore ways to dramatically advance the trustworthiness of mobile and embedded devices and ecosystems. For example, the joint research will seek ways to develop secure, car-to-device communications for added driver safety; new approaches to secure mobile commerce, and a better understanding of privacy and its various implementations. By grounding the research in the needs of future users, the institute will then research software and hardware to enable robust, available, survivable systems for those use cases.