Project Sopris

The Seven Properties of Highly Secure Devices

The next decade promises the democratization of connectivity to every device. Significant drops in the cost of connectivity mean that every form of electrical device—every child’s toy, every household’s appliances, and every industry’s equipment—will become connected to the Internet. Tens of billions of these devices are controlled by microcontrollers, a class of device particularly ill-prepared for the security challenges of internet connectivity.

The Project Sopris research team is exploring the goal of securing the vast number of low cost internet connected devices coming online. Our first Technical Report “The Seven Properties of Highly Secure Devices” is published here outlining our research, including the following:

• seven properties we assert are required in all highly secure devices
• our experiments towards designing microcontroller based prototype devices that are highly secure and exhibit these properties

As part of this research work, we have tested different approaches to device security from silicon to software and hypothesize that optimal device security must be rooted in hardware but kept up-to-date through evolving software. Read our first technical report (opens in new tab) to learn more.

The Sopris Team invites the security research community to engage with us and validate our latest experiment, the Sopris board, by applying to participate in the Project Sopris Challenge (opens in new tab).

Project Sopris Security Challenge

Thanks to all the skilled hackers who participated!

Over 150 hackers pounding on their Project Sopris boards for 60 days. Microsoft Research
Sopris Challenge completes as a great learning experience with no verified exploits.

Stay tuned for updates from the Project Sopris team as we continue to work with
the security community to explore devices secured from the silicon up.