lowRISC Appoints Cybersecurity Expert Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert to Board of Directors

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom, Oct. 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- lowRISC C.I.C., the open source system on a chip (SoC) organization, today announced the appointment of Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert to its board of directors.

Eckert holds the chair for IT Security in the Department of Computer Science at Technical University of Munich (TUM) and is director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) in Munich, overseeing more than 220 researchers. She has over 30 years of research and development experience in the field of IT security, with a focus on new methods and technology to increase embedded system and application security, as well as research aimed at increasing the resilience of systems against attacks.

"We are very pleased to welcome Prof. Dr. Eckert – a premier expert in the field – to our board of directors," said Gavin Ferris, CEO of lowRISC. "She shares our vision for the future of open-source hardware and silicon development and her R&D experience in IT security will be of great value in moving our mission forward. With her breadth of knowledge and her technical insight, Prof. Eckert will help us deliver an industry first: high-quality, secure open-source system-on-chip designs."

Eckert joins Andy Hopper, professor of Computer Technology and former head of the Department of Computer Science Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and independent chair, treasurer, and vice president of The Royal Society; Luca Benini, professor of Electronics at University of Bologna, chair of Digital Circuits and Systems at ETH Zurich; Gavin Ferris, CEO, lowRISC; Ron Munich, senior staff software engineer at Google; Robert Mullins, professor of Computer Architecture at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge; and Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan Project Lead, Google.

"As someone who is very active in the cybersecurity field and open-source software space, I am proud to lend my expertise in open-source and related security issues to advance lowRISC's mission of bringing secure open-source innovation to the silicon design ecosystem," said Eckert. "lowRISC's forward-looking approach addresses some of the most significant technology challenges we're facing – from global chip supply shortages to security implementation. lowRISC's innovation in open-source hardware is unparalleled and I am proud to be a part of this important and exciting endeavor."

Eckert earned her degree in Computer Science at the University of Bonn and finished her Ph.D. at TUM. She worked at several universities including the University of Oldenburg, Kiel University, LMU Munich, and the University of Bremen. She founded the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt, of which she was deputy director until 2010, and later went on to found the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security in Munich with a specially created professorship alongside it at TUM.

As a member of various national and international industrial advisory boards and scientific committees, Eckert advises companies, business associations and the public sector on all IT security issues. In specialist committees, she is involved in the design of the technical and scientific framework in Germany and in the design of scientific funding programs at the EU level.

Eckert has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Society for Information Technology's Digital Minds award, which honors those who advance digital development in Germany. In 2011, the trade journal Computerwoche ranked Eckert among the top 100 most important personalities in the German ICT landscape.

About lowRISC
lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company whose founding mission is to demonstrate, promote and support the use of open-source silicon - bringing the benefits of open-source design to the hardware world. We are producing high-quality, security-focused, open, and flexible IP. Our expertise includes RISC-V processor core design, contributing to the LLVM Compiler, and — in collaboration with our growing family of industry and academic partners — developing and hosting the Silicon Commons in support of our ecosystem of open-source silicon implementations.