Pyrotechnical safety-critical system – STEPY

Developing solutions to ensure the physical security of highly sensitive and confidential components and data is essential for our society to thrive. However, despite the diversity of software and hardware protection solutions available today, their effectiveness does not always reach 100%. In a geopolitical context where risks are increasingly threatening, it is crucial that our governments and agencies like the DGA and ANSSI equip themselves with a range of technological, software, and hardware solutions deployable as needed to ensure maximum, if not total, protection against hacking and reverse engineering.

We propose the development of ultimate security measures, called sterilizing microsystems, capable of triggering when conventional protections have failed to protect a strategic organ facing a malicious attack or at the end of its life. The DGA/AID thesis by F. Sèvely, which demonstrated the potential destruction of a bare SD memory by nanothermites, will serve as the foundation for this maturation project, which aims to (1) strengthen, characterize, and reliably establish the destruction function using pyrotechnic material based on nanothermites, and (2) deliver a sterilizing microsystem in 30 months, fully and discreetly integrated onto the memory component to be protected, qualified in the application environment (TRL5). Although memory destruction will be externally activated in this project, a technological assessment of integrating control and energy will be conducted, opening the possibility for future intelligent activation to address cases of malicious intrusion or programming aimed at neutralizing the system before disposal.

Precisely, to achieve TRL5 in 30 months, we will work to:

• Enhance the destruction potential of the sterilizer developed by S. Sèvely by:

loading the nanothermite with a highly oxidizing composition such as ZKNO3 or BKNO3, replacing the unstable Cu(NH3)4(NO3)2.
integrating the pyrotechnic composition into the casing as close to the bare chip as possible, relying on 3D integration technologies.
• Characterize destruction by measuring the size of residues resulting from destruction.
• Characterize the stability of the pyrotechnic composition based on nanothermites with all phases of sterilizer manufacturing and technological transfer.
• Characterize the quantity of useful pyrotechnic composition per unit area of the component to be destroyed to precisely design products that avoid collateral damage.
• Characterize the sterilizer in isolation to evaluate its stability and performance in the usage environment, especially military.

In case of success, the project's impact on defense and civilian society is evident. The development of sterilizing microsystems, which do not exist today, given the demanding specifications, will simply and effectively destroy data contained in components in the event of malicious intrusion or end-of-life of a weapon system. The second innovation lies in the transfer of a collective process and a direct writing equipment allowing the deposition of composite pyrotechnic materials based on metals that will enrich TETHYS techniques, paving the way for the design of new functionalities and/or enabling the design of innovative and more miniaturized pyrotechnic systems for defense, space, and civilian domains.