Much has been said about the potential of IoT. So much so, that it is has been featured at the peak of inflated expectations on Gartner’s hype cycle for quite some time. As the hype inevitably subsides, the reality of delivering the benefits of IoT grows, and the initial excitement turns to concern. Challenges around security and … Read More
Industry Analyst Perspectives On The Apple WWDC 2016 Keynote
I was in-person and live at Apple’s WWDC keynote in San Francisco. The following are my quick takeaways from the event.
Watch and watchOS:
Apple is focusing on exactly what they should be with watchOS, and that’s speed, ease of use and upping the ante in health and fitness. With the first Watch and watchOS, Apple solved many of the problems… Read More
SMART sensors with OTP memory for the IIoT
A few years back before IoT became the buzzword, the industrial automation community had already talking about “smart sensors” since the mid-1990s. The impetus for those discussions was IEEE 1451, a family of standards for adding intelligence and wireless communications to sensors so they could be incorporated into field networks.… Read More
Car Theft Making a Comeback
In the U.K., where vehicle theft has been in a steep decline for the past 20 years, the most widespread advice given by police to car owners is: keep your car keys in your freezer. The most common source of vulnerability these days is the interception of RF signals between keyfobs and cars. For a time, several years ago, there was a rash… Read More
Safety = Security?
Have you ever wondered what the difference is between safety and security? I would be surprised if you had unless you work in these areas as we tend to use the words interchangeably. Languages such as German, Norwegian and Spanish have one word to mean both – or so I am told by my associates who claim those languages as their mother… Read More
Safety Verification for Software
When automakers are thinking about the safety of an embedded system in a car, while it’s good to know the hardware has been comprehensively tested for safety-specific requirements, that isn’t much help if the software component of the system is not supplied with similarly robust guarantees.
The challenge is that the software … Read More
Android Auto-Rooting Malware – You Can Run But You Can’t Hide
There has been a startling rise in a class of Android auto-rooting malware which is believed to affect over a quarter of a million phones in the US and well over a million in each of India and China. The attack has primarily infected older versions of Android (so far) – KitKat, JellyBean and Lolipop primarily.
The malware, known as Shedun… Read More
IBM z13 Helps Avoid Costly Data Breaches
A global study sponsored by IBM and conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach for companies surveyed has grown to $4 million, representing a 29 percent increase since 2013. With cybersecurity incidents continuing to increase with 64% more security incidents in 2015 than in 2014 the costs are… Read More
Software Security is Necessary but NOT Sufficient
As the silicon designs inside the connected devices of the Internet of Things transition from specifications to tapeouts, electronics companies have come to the stark realization that software security is simply not adequate. Securing silicon is now a required, not optional, part of RTL design processes.… Read More
Whose IoT devices were breached in 2015?
IoT, as we all know, is not without issues–though we have become reliant upon it in many ways.. In 2015, there were some very viable and tangible proofs that the IoT field is fraught with real peril and that we as IoT designers, developers and companies need to be paying more attention to security. Just how many different IoT … Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot