On Target: Embedded Systems

Security Comes to the Forefront at IoT Security Conference 2015

Members of the VDC Team spent the last two days at the inaugural IoT Security event on the beautiful Boston waterfront, where Steve Hoffenberg, VDC’s Director of IoT & Embedded Technology, spoke alongside a diverse and distinguished panel of guests that included various leaders of government, research, and industry. One of the main themes that emerged throughout the two-day conference was the growing importance and adoption of Security as a Service. If it makes more sense from both a financial and an operations perspective to outsource computing, storage, applications, and infrastructure to specialized providers in order to capitalize on economies... Read more →

VDC's Steve Hoffenberg Speaking at IoT Security Conference in Boston

VDC's Director of IoT & Embedded Technology will be speaking at the IoT Security conference in Boston, September 22-23. He'll be hosting an Analyst Breakfast Briefing roundtable discussion on Wednesday, September 23, and also on that same day, he'll be participating as a panelist in the session entitled, "Maximizing Technology to Safeguard the Business of IoT." Check out the full conference info at www.iotsecurityevent.com. If you plan to attend and would like to connect with Steve there, contact him at [email protected]. Read more →

More Tales from the Road - VDC at ESC Silicon Valley 2015

ESC Silicon Valley 2015 In case you missed it, VDC’s IoT & Embedded Technology was recently in Santa Clara for the 2015 Embedded Systems Conference – Silicon Valley. We had the opportunity to meet with and get updates from a number of companies, both at the show and several nearby corporate headquarters. Vendors we spoke with were pleased with the volume and quality of the attendees and many training sessions operated at full capacity. As we have for the past decade, VDC Research presented the annual Embeddy Award to the organization judged to have announced the most significant advance in... Read more →

Lingering Thoughts from NIWeek 2015

VDC’s IoT and Embedded Technologies team recently attended NIWeek 2015 in Austin, TX. National Instruments (NI) put on an excellent conference and we had the opportunity to take in a great deal. There were inspiring and informative keynote presentations, great partner stories, the heat, interesting panel sessions, helpful one-on-one meetings with NI executives, the strange layout of the Austin Convention Center (it allegedly has a floor 2, but I’m not buying that), demos on the exhibit floor…and, well, did I mention the heat? The IoT / IIoT Centric Focus of NIWeek Regardless of the format – keynote, panels, demos, 1:1’s... Read more →

IoT Use Cases for Enigma & Homomorphic Encryption

Homomorphic encryption is a method of encryption that allows computations to be performed upon fully encrypted data, generating an encrypted result that, after decryption, will match the result of the desired operations on the plaintext, decrypted data. In other words, homomorphic encryption allows a user to manipulate data without needing to decrypt it first. Daniele Micciancio states the problem that is solved by homomorphic encryption in a 2010 journal article entitled A First Glimpse of Cryptography’s Holy Grail: Using standard encryption technology we are immediately faced with a dilemma: either we store our data unencrypted and reveal our precious or... Read more →

Does Windows 10 violate HIPAA?

According to Microsoft's privacy statement for Windows 10 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx), for the Input Personalization feature, "...your typed and handwritten words are collected to provide you a personalized user dictionary, help you type and write on your device with better character recognition, and provide you with text suggestions as you type or write. Typing data includes a sample of characters and words you type, which we scrub to remove IDs, IP addresses, and other potential identifiers." Some observers have likened this feature to a keylogger, and it is turned on by default in Windows 10. In addition, Windows 10 Input Personalization, "collect[s]... Read more →

PubNub Taps IoT Niche with Real Time Data Streams

The tremendous growth potential of the IoT has created a market battle between many large, well-known companies such as Amazon, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. But how do smaller companies and startups become competitive in the race for IoT success? One answer: create or exploit a niche within the IoT. PubNub is a notable entrant in this respect. Streaming of real time data is useful in a variety of IoT applications, including finance, weather, traffic, communication, E-commerce, security, systems control, home and vehicle automation, advertising, and gaming. Since PubNub's founding in 2009, the company has firmly established itself in... Read more →

Microsoft Setting Precedents in Data Sovereignty and Residency

Microsoft recently announced that the company will open two datacenters in Canada, to provide its Azure cloud service to the Canadian Government and businesses operating in that country. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, said “this substantial investment in a Canadian cloud demonstrates how committed we are to bringing even more opportunity to Canadian businesses and government organizations, helping them fully realize the cost savings and flexibility of the cloud.” (To read the full press release from Microsoft, see here.) In an article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper about the announcement, Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada, said, “there... Read more →

Privacy and Security Trends in IoT – Parsing the FTC’s Guidance

Privacy and security are both huge concerns for consumers and businesses alike in the evolving IoT landscape. Privacy is the unauthorized use of data by an entity that has been granted access to a dataset. Thus it is generally privacy that forms the relationship between companies and customers, and any breach of this contract is a privacy concern. Security, on the other hand, is the unauthorized use and or/access of data by an entity that has not been granted access to some dataset; e.g. hacking and external security breaches. Both privacy and security goals will be hard to reconcile with... Read more →

Samsung Invests in Sigfox. Is the Race Over for Long-Range Low-Power Wireless Competitors?

A preliminary market battle has been brewing over the past year between technologies to connect IoT devices via wireless wide area networks. These cellular-type networks allow very low power battery devices to transmit small amounts of data over several miles, a solution highly suitable to many types of IoT devices such weather sensors and smart meters. Entrants in this market include Sigfox, LoRa, and Neul. (In addition, standards organization IEEE is developing the 802.11ah wireless networking protocol for distances up to a kilometer.) Sigfox announced on June 15 that Samsung’s Artik IoT platform would integrate Sigfox support. Also, noted in... Read more →