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 →

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 →

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 →