Press Releases

Since October 1, Prof. Dr. Franziska Boenisch has been directing the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC. At the same time, she was appointed to the Chair of Software and Systems Security at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Prof. Dr. Georg Sigl is taking over as Managing Director of Fraunhofer AISEC. He has been the director of Fraunhofer AISEC since 2010 and is a professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in the Chair of Information Security.

The Fraunhofer RISC-V Secure Element is now available as a licensable security platform for custom systems-on-chip (SoCs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and chiplets. The silicon prototype has successfully completed functional validation. Based on this verified hardware foundation, companies can shorten development cycles, reduce technical risk, and implement security by design more effectively at the semiconductor level.

Advances in agentic AI are making it increasingly easy for attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software. The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC is therefore joining the seL4 Foundation and conducting research into the use of the formally verified seL4 microkernel as the foundation for provably secure systems. An ini-tial focus is on virtual machines and confidential computing.

ANONY-MED 2 is working to make health data securely usable for AI-based diagnoses. The project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space BMFTR, implements two key approaches: first, the anonymization of datasets through privacy-preserving data synthesis; and second, the anonymization of AI model parameters through privacy-preserving model training. The goal is to develop an open toolkit and a practical handbook to help hospitals get started with modern anonymization technologies. Using the specific case of stroke therapy as a model, demonstrators are being developed using modern security concepts and architectures. Under the consortium leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, partners include Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the software company Smart Reporting GmbH.

U.S. tech giants dominate the cloud market. This threatens the technological sovereignty, data protection, and innovative capacity of European companies. In the “ApeiroRA” project, the Fraunhofer Institutes for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST) and for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) are supporting the software company SAP in securing Europe’s technological and economic independence in the cloud and edge sectors. The partners are developing an open-source blueprint for a European, vendor-neutral cloud-edge infrastructure that guarantees interoperability among different providers.

With the RISC-V Secure Element, the Fraunhofer Institutes for Integrated Circuits IIS, for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, and for Electronic Microsystems and Solid State Technologies EMFT are introducing a security chip that was designed and manufactured in Germany. The design is based on transparent open-source hardware, integrates post-quantum cryptography, and can be used as a standalone chip or as a system-on-chip component. The goal is to offer companies a trustworthy and customizable trust anchor – with points of contact in the EU – for connected devices and to support them in meeting the requirements of the European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

An industry consortium comprised of Intel, Infineon, Siemens, SAP and Bosch will develop a joint data room infrastructure for semiconductor manufacturing by September in the Semiconductor-X project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE). The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB) have now joined the consortium as cybersecurity partners and are developing a road map for secure data rooms. The goal is to enable companies to exchange sensitive production and process data securely along the value chain. The results are also intended to support other Manufacturing-X initiatives.

lowRISC C.I.C., the open-silicon ecosystem organization, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, one of Europe’s leading institutions for cybersecurity research, today announced that Fraunhofer has officially joined the OpenTitan® project as a key security testing partner. By bringing its world-renowned hardware evaluation expertise to the world’s first open-source silicon Root of Trust (RoT), Fraunhofer will play a critical role in independently validating the project's resilience against advanced physical and logical attacks.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) has joined the OpenHW Foundation. The goal of this collaboration is to advance open, trustworthy, and highly secure hardware platforms, thereby strengthening a key component of digital sovereignty in Europe.

Quantum computers are expected in the near future to break cryptographic schemes. As a result, critical data is already at risk today if it is intercepted and later decrypted using quantum computers. At the 5th PQC Update hosted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, experts in post-quantum cryptography (PQC) presented the current status of international PQC migration and gave recommendations for action: companies and public authorities must now, at the latest, inventory their cryptography, set priorities and protect particularly sensitive data first, combine classical and PQC schemes, and establish crypto agility. The need for action is considerable, as PQC is also relevant to the EU’s NIS 2 directive, which will have to be implemented in Germany from the end of 2025 to enhance cybersecurity. The EU roadmap calls for PQC migration of critical infrastructures by 2030 and full implementation by 2035.