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Ever wondered why it is so hard and expensive to build and deploy connected products and IoT solutions based on cellular connectivity? And how it can be done better?
Learn from Electric Imp CEO Hugo Fiennes — the guy who built the iPhone at Apple and architected the first Nest thermostat — about how Electric Imp reinvented cellular IoT.
The ZigBee Alliance recently issued a Statement on Security, prompted by the widely reported attack “IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction”.While this attack may not be based on a weakness of the ZigBee standards it does highlight a key weakness in the way most IoT deployments are architected today, which is by integrating a number of disjunct technology components and services from different suppliers and then facing the challenge of maintaining security of the combined result for years to come.
This approach has a high risk of mistakes, resulting in unproven designs, integration gaps, or weak links, and makes it very difficult to rapidly address security vulnerabilities because fixes need to percolate through the entire integration chain before becoming effective. By that time, the damage is often done.
The below diagram illustrates the topic:
We at Electric Imp believe the problem needs to be addressed with a very different approach: By offering a fully integrated and tested silicon-to-cloud security architecture with ongoing platform and security maintenance. Security not only at deployment, but over the lifetime of the solution.
Defense-in-Depth and Defense-over-Time. It’s how IoT Security needs to be done.
Cheers,
— Terrence
Update Nov 18, 2016:
Yesterday, the Z-Wave Alliance also made an announcement for plans to beef up security. This highlights the challenge of retrofitting existing deployed devices and the moving target security presents.
Electric Imp just announced the latest version of our device-side software, impOS(TM) release 34.
impOS is a highly secure, advanced, and efficient software platform for IoT devices that features a sophisticated customer edge application platform, out-of-the-box deployment readiness, and seamless integration into the Electric Imp cloud and security-as-a-service offering.
Among the many enhancements, impOS 34 continuous to lead the industry in terms of security with advanced features such as:
- TLS 1.2 with forward secrecy
- 4096 bit RSA key and certificates
- ed25519 challenge-response
- FIPS 140-2 certified HSM system
Much more information can be found on the official Electric Imp blog.
Cheers,
— Terrence
By now it should be pretty clear that security is a critical topic in any serious IoT offering. Mistakes can ruin your business.
While many people in the industry are still debating IoT security and the best ways to achieve it, Electric Imp has already shipped more than 500,000 devices with our comprehensive end-to-end security architecture and ‘security as a service’ model – which means Electric Imp provides ongoing security maintenance for as long as you need your devices to be connected.
We deliver worry-free connectivity so you can focus on your product.
For a brief overview, check out the short 1-minute video.
Cheers,
— Terrence
One of the tricky aspects of deploying connected products or IoT devices is how to enroll these devices into the system once in the field and provision the necessary connectivity and authentication parameters in a reliable and secure way.
Traditional methods (such as WPS, pre-embedding identity in the device, barcode stickers, or manual entry) are either incomplete, expose attack surface, or failure-prone.
Electric Imp uses a clever optical transmission method called BlinkUp(™). BlinkUp is a small app (available for iOS and Android) which allows the user to enter connectivity information (e.g. WiFi SSID and password), and then the app provisions these parameters (together with an enrollment nonce) to the Electric Imp device optically via the phone screen, and completes a secure and replay-proof device enrollment process within a couple of seconds.
While, at first, it may seem a bit usual to hold your phone up against a device, BlinkUp is actually one of the easiest, fastest, and most secure way to bring devices online and a key feature of the Electric Imp platform.
We just released a major update to the BlinkUp app, making it more user friendly and streamlined. Check out the full blog post with more information.
Cheers,
— Terrence
Quick announcement:
We just released the first version of our Microsoft Azure IoT Hub library, which provides drop-in integration between customer’s imp-enabled devices in the field and the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform via the Azure IoT Hub. Read all about it in this blog post or go directly to the Electric Imp Dev Center to check out the code.
Cheers,
— Terrence
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