Tillitis Key 1

This week we presented the Tillitis Key 1 at the Open Source Firmware Conference. What we unveiled is a new kind of security device in the form of a USB stick and a new company, a sister company to Mullvad VPN: Tillitis. Yes, this means I now work for a new company.

The stick is a small computer that can load and run small programs uploaded to it from a host computer. It always measures every new program and derives a unique secret for every program that can be used as an identifier, for instance by deriving a public/private key pair from the identity and signing messages.

Myself, Daniel "quite" Lublin and Björn Töpel have written the software: the qemu emulator code, the firmware, the uploadable programs, the host software, some of the interfaces to the chip simulator, and some build stuff. Joachim Strömbergson did the hardware design in Verilog. Matt Metts did the PCB designs and the firmware for the MCU and the programmer as well as handling all the production. Fredrik Strömberg came up with the idea, the initial function design, and a lot of whiteboarding.