Ensuring Security in the Connected Home

Update: Synopsys Expands Security Solutions with Acquisition of Elliptic Technologies (June 29, 2015)

Ogi Brkic, VP of Marketing & Business Development at Elliptic Technologies
ECNmag (05/11/2015)

Security plays a critical role in the market adoption of the IoT. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which an intruder uses a connected appliance to gain control of someone's smart home or access to their personal information. Whatever the application, security must be addressed from the initial design and remain the core component of the system. This is essential in the deployment of these devices and the promise behind the intelligent connected home.

Secure enablement for the IoT made easy with a Root of Trust

In the intelligent connected home, routers, home gateways, and other IoT hubs will represent critical components of the home IoT ecosystem. It is likely that multiple IoT hubs will be present in many homes, and hubs take on many forms. Some of these will be specialized for particular applications, others for particular wireless or broadband protocols. Hubs may take the form of a traditional router with or without integrated broadband technology, a cablevision, satellite TV or IPTV set-top box, or a common home appliance. It is likely that, as is common now, a single gateway will connect the home to an external broadband or wireless network, and will also act as aggregation and control points for end point devices connected through the short range wireless standards mentioned above. The home gateway will in some cases be responsible for securely communicating data to and from the cloud, enabling premium services such as streamed 4K content, and may occasionally be responsible for securely updating other connected IoT devices such as appliances, sensors and alarm systems. Today, the majority of hundreds of millions of home routers are using rudimentary software based security. Almost a year after the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug was discovered, according to the Cisco Annual Security 2015 Report, 56 percent of devices indexed by Cisco use versions of OpenSSL more than 50 months old. We cannot rely on consumers to protect themselves and ensure that software patches are up to date.

Security must be invisible to them and it should just work. So then, how can these hubs be trusted?

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