The Week In Review: IoT

Management
Intel has hired Tom Lantzsch, the executive vice president of strategy at ARM Holdings, to serve as senior vice president and general manager of its IoT Group, effective in January. Lantzsch succeeds Douglas Davis, a senior vice president who was running the IoT Group and had announced plans to retire from Intel after more than 30 years. Davis reconsidered that move, however; he will stay on with the chipmaker as senior VP and GM of the new Automated Driving Group, which is being spun out of the IoT Group. Intel also named Kathy Winter, who joined Intel this year from Delphi Automotive, as VP and GM of the Automated Solutions Division within the ADG.

Security
Two cybercriminals claim to have modified the Mirai malware that brought down multiple leading websites on October 21 and are offering the botnet program to buyers. One of the hackers says he and his partner in crime have taken control of 1 million IoT devices. He also claims to be responsible for the Internet outage experienced last weekend by Deutsche Telekom customers.

The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) this week said its IoT Security working group is developing a benchmark to gauge the efficiency of security implementations in IoT devices. A beta release is planned for the first quarter of 2017. “The market for IoT security products is currently small but is growing rapidly as both consumers and businesses use connected devices in ever greater numbers and realize their vulnerabilities,” Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. “Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30% from 2015, and will reach 11.4 billion by 2018. However, considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritization and security awareness.” EEMBC President Markus Levy added, “Security is a priority of application developers, though they are typically concerned that implementing security functions within their IoT devices will hurt performance and lower battery life. Therefore, a critical goal of our new benchmark will be to quantify the latency and energy impact of implementing security to allow developers to select the optimal combination of microcontroller, hardware, and/or software security products for their application.”

The U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows cybersecurity professionals to hack IoT devices for research purposes, provided these acts are done within a controlled environment. Such experiments cannot be done for malicious exploits, the federal agency said.

Amazon Web Services collaborated with Eseye to develop the AnyNet Secure subscriber identity module for greater IoT security, using the AWS Cloud management console and platform. Eseye CEO Julian Hardy said in a statement, “This new technology will ultimately allow more and varied products to go to market and to succeed by offering AWS customers the chance to take much of the cost, risk and time out of M2M IoT deployments. Collectively, we create a globally-available ubiquitous service layer through which projects can be deployed at scale, in a more secure manner and way that was previously impossible for customers. AnyNet Secure removes the need to make long-term sacrifices on security or go through a painstaking deployment process of manual intervention, one device at a time.”

The Internet of Things presents “a wondrous vision,” yet it obviously needs greater cybersecurity, Sanjay Sarma and Josh Siegel from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology write. Their suggestions: Watch out for unintended consequences; let cloud things help; build in watchdogs; and beware Trojan horses.

Analysis

General Electric and Siemens are longstanding rivals in industrial machinery. While GE is remaking itself to adopt Internet of Things technology, Siemens is sticking close to its old-fashioned knitting, this analysis concludes. Both giants are grappling with the merger of information technology and operating technology.

Conferences
Frost & Sullivan presents the 11th Annual New Product Innovation & Development 2017: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange on January 9-11, 2017, at the San Diego Marriott in La Jolla, Calif. Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things will be among the topics discussed, featuring presentations by executives of Intel, Tile, the Silicon Valley Innovation Center, Schneider Electric, and Microsoft Ventures.

The sixth annual IoT Summit is scheduled for March 16-17, 2017, at the convention center in Santa Clara, Calif. The event is put on by the International Society for Quality Electronic Design (ISQED).

Consortia
CENTRI Technology says it has joined the Industrial Internet Consortium. The company offers the Internet of Things Advanced Security (IoTAS) platform. “The Internet of Things needs a much different kind of security, not the same old tools companies have used in the past to secure data between laptops, desktops and browsers,” Vaughan Emery, president and CEO of CENTRI Technology, said in a statement. “CENTRI IoTAS is purpose-built for Internet of Things and is the simplest way for developers to include end-to-end data encryption, optimization, device authentication and complete visibility with forensics and analytics for IoT projects. We look forward to contributing to the Industrial Internet Consortium to help educate audiences on this new paradigm of security.” Richard Soley, executive director of the Industrial Internet Consortium, added, “Cloud data security is critical to companies today. We’re excited to have CENTRI working with us as we define ways to help enterprises protect their cloud data and secure IoT devices.”

Market Research
Mobile Experts forecasts shipments of wireless IoT modules for automotive electronics will triple from 200 million units in 2015 to more than 600 million units in 2021. Revenue from automotive IoT modules will increase from about $6 billion now to $10.9 billion in 2021, according to the market research firm.

Research and Markets forecasts the worldwide health-care IoT market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 37.6% from 2015 to 2020, increasing from about $24.7 billion in 2014. The firm has a report, Global Internet of Things (IoT) Healthcare Market Size, Share, Development, Growth and Demand Forecast to 2020.

Related Stories
Optimizing Multiple IoT Layers
Where and how IoT engineering teams are approaching design optimization among various layers of the IoT.
Agricultural IoT: Outstanding In The Field
The Internet of Things for agriculture. Yes, it’s a thing—and a huge market.
IoT, Architectures, And Security
ARM CTO Mike Muller discusses how markets and technology are changing in a very candid one-on-one interview.