If you haven’t already noticed, the Internet of Things is quickly becoming the Internet of Everything. It is predicted that by 2020, there will be anywhere from 20 billion to 38.5 billion internet-connected devices globally. Naturally, as the number of connected devices continues to grow, so does the increasing concern for security, particularly when you take recent events into consideration.
Last Friday’s denial of service attack that temporarily took down several top websites was just the tip of the iceberg for what’s to come with hackers taking advantage of insecure IoT devices and using them as a powerful botnet. While consumers must work to protect themselves by changing default passwords and maintaining up-to-date software and firmware, technology developers also need to take greater steps in designing safer IoT products.
This week at TechCon, chip design company ARM revealed a new family of Cortex-M processors that will help secure future IoT device hardware. According to Michel Buffa, Group VP of STMicroelectronics, these new chips “are set to unleash the next wave of innovation in IoT, where trust and security will be foundational.”
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At just a fraction of a millimeter, these processors incorporate ARM’s TrustZone solution, a hardware-based security built into SoC (system on chip) processors for establishing a root of trust. TrustZone has already been integrated into many ARM microprocessors utilized in popular smartphones and tablets, and even Netflix uses it to prevent people from playing videos on unapproved devices. TrustZone has been around for about a decade for Windows, Mac OS, and Android products, just never for chips this small or low-powered. The TrustZone hardware isolation technology essentially creates a separate area on the chip where trusted code can run. This code is smaller than a typical OS so it provides a smaller “attack surface” for hackers that can easily be vetted for flaws.
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The new Cortex-M33 chip will offer a 20% performance improvement as well as improved power efficiency over the legacy Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 processors. While the Cortex-M33 is just one-tenth of a square millimeter, the ultra-low powered Cortex-M23 has a form factor 75% smaller than that. Both IoT security chips are backwards compatible with ARMv6-M and ARMv7-M architectures and feature TrustZone CryptoCell-312 fortifications.
There are numerous partners who are already licensed and will deploy the Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 including Analog Devices, Microchip, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Silicon Labs, and STMicroelectronics.
ARM expects that these tiny, low-power chips will be used in applications where a small tag or wearable device does not even require a battery let alone outlet power. The wearable medical band or package tracking tag could harvest enough energy to function just from standard motion.
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Along with the new chips, ARM introduced a cloud-based platform to manage and update the millions of IoT processors deployed across a city or global enterprise. This mbed Cloud software-as-a-service platform can get a device set up and connected with a security key for the communications channel and specify who can get access to the data from the device. It will also handle firmware updates over time and ultimately help prevent IoT-based DDoS attacks by monitoring all devices on the network. The platform would be able to shut down abnormally chatty devices that have potentially been hacked and are in the process of attacking a server.
From consumer goods to manufacturing, agriculture, and medicine, nearly every large industry is on the brink of major IoT data and efficiency improvements. Confidentiality of this data and security of the devices are key to the global acceptance and trust of future IoT applications. With the introduction of a more complete solution to secure data from the sensor to the service, ARM has taken great strides in providing a foundation for protected technology at the hardware level.