Research & Publications

2026-04-28

At yasec, we have years of experience in both academic research and in open-source development. Here, you find some of our past research output.

The Kimesh Tamper Sensing Mesh Plugin for Kicad

2026-04-30

Yasec maintains Kimesh, a plugin for generating tamper sensing mesh trace layouts in the open source Kicad EDA tool. The plugin supports arbitrary PCB shapes, cutouts, and can route around existing footprints and traces on the PCB.

Monitoring Tamper-Sensing Meshes Using Low-Cost, Embedded Time-Domain Reflectometry

2026-04-28

A PCB with several chips sitting on a table with another PCB
with only traces on it plugged in through a board-edge connector. The first PCB looks not very complex. — The final setup. On the right is the measurement board, and on the left is the mesh test specimen plugged in. In a real application, you would integrate both into your target circuit.

Jan has a new paper published [in TCHES 2026/1](https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/12692), which they will present at [CHES 2026 in Antalya, Turkey](https://ches.iacr.org/2026/) in October. The paper presents a method for monitoring tamper-sensing meshes via time-domain reflectometry using low-cost, off-the-shelf components. The research resulted in a circuit that achieves TDR measurement resolution in the range of a few hundred picoseconds at a BoM cost of about 10 €.