A secure bridge to your connected devices
Your phone, your computer, your tablet - all these connected objects have one thing in common, buried deep within them: a chip. For a long time, this indispensable integrated circuit represented a security flaw that can now be plugged thanks to technology created by the Algodone company.
May 7, 2021, USA. An extraordinary cyberattack targets the Colonial Pipeline, the largest refined petroleum products pipeline in the United States, threatening the supply of hydrocarbons to an entire section of the country. June 2017, Ukraine. A fifth of the city of Kiev is left without electricity, hackers having infiltrated the computers of Ukrenergo, the Ukrainian electricity company.
What do these two events have in common? "The introduction of a software virus that contaminated the internal networks of these companies, with a new and unexpected impact: malicious activation directly on physical infrastructures. This attack was programmed to include the ability to 'talk' directly to network equipment, by sending commands to the control systems, i.e. to the very heart of the hardware", replies Lionel Torres, researcher at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics (Lirmm)*.
So our thousands of connected objects are just as many security loopholes? "There's clearly a weak point in all these devices: their chips, which have little or no security and represent an easy entry point for hackers." Armed with this worrying observation, the microelectronics specialist decided in 2015 to develop an adapted solution. "When you use a computer, you were given a license to run the software, but no equivalent system then existed for the chips, so we created it." Together with Jérôme Rampon and Gaël Paul, he founded Algodone, with the support of Languedoc-Roussillon Incubation and SATT AxLR. His goal: to offer a secure bridge between connected devices.
New business model
With a first patent filed in 2015 and a physical demonstrator in its wake, Algodone proposes nothing less than an entirely new business model: "We offer a device that enables the secure activation, configuration, protection and monetization of electronic system networks. This is what we call a secure activation license technology", explains the researcher. It authorizes the integrated circuit to operate and prevents anyone from accessing it. It can even selectively allow certain users access to certain data. An original idea that earned Algodone a place in the 2015 i-Lab innovation competition.
After raising €1.2 million in 2017, the small company has grown and Algodone now has 11 employees. And some big customers. "We mainly work for the cyber-security sector, with major groups such as Thales, Dassault aviation, MBDA or STMicroelectronics," explains Lionel Torres. A major challenge for this sector, whose mission is to make connected objects rhyme with security.
* Lirmm (UM, CNRS, INRIA, UPVD, UPVM)