Google has completed work on the opentitan platform, which creates trustworthy hardware components known as ROT (Root of Trust). The platform has gone through various stages of development including testing and verification of Register Transfer Level (RTL) sagm and hardware blocks descriptions in SystemVerilog language. The company has declared the logical design of the platform as suitable for creating a physical chip and has frozen the system from making further changes. The project is now on the logical synthesis stage, where the high-level RTL is transformed into a low-level description at the level of logical elements and conductors. The working prototypes of the chips are expected to be launched by the end of 2023.
Opentitan provides a verified and reliable framework that can be used to guarantee the integrity of the software and hardware system elements, confirming that the critically important parts of the system have not been replaced. The project is recognized as suitable for creating solutions to increase confidence and reduce costs in the development of specialized chips to ensure safety.
Opentitan chips are designed for use in server motherboards, network cards, routers, Internet devices verification of firmware and load components, generating cryptographically unique system identifiers, protecting cryptographic keys and conducting an isolated audit log that cannot be erased or edited.
Opentitan is inclusive of various logical blocks that are important in ROT chips, including an open microprocessor based on RISC-V architecture (RV32IMCB IBEX), cryptographic accompaniment of random numbers, keys to support Dice, manager the mechanism of secure data storage in permanent and RAM, protection technology, input/output units, safe loading products, and more. The device also provides blocks with the implementation of typical encryption algorithms, such as AES and HMAC-SHA256, and an accelerator of mathematical operations used in algorithms for working with digital signatures based on open keys, such as RSA and algorithms based on elliptical curves.
A block diagram of the opentitan platform is accessible through the following link: https://opentitan.org/book/hw/top_earlgrey/doc/top_earlgrey_block_diagram.svg.