Connected Devices and IoT

I’m sipping coffee while listening to my sweet new U2 album, and I’m pondering the future of openness with the Apple Watch. I haven’t seen any commentary about the fact that at launch it will only work with a recent iPhone. I certainly could be wrong, but I don’t think this state of affairs will… View Article

I’ve got a new blog post up on the Altera system design blog. It’s about designing secure IoT devices: Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices are real-world objects like appliances and thermostats, and therefore network security should be a paramount concern for vendors of IoT systems. Nothing erodes trust faster than real-world and personal consequences:… View Article

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the EE Live Internet-of-Things conference in San Jose last month. Since then, I’ve been reflecting on some of the bleeding edge technical concepts that were discussed there. It occurs to me that many of the IoT devices we are asked to design act as a standalone… View Article

I’ve got a new blog post up at EE Times, talking about how to architect the network communications protocols for Internet-of-Things devices: Crafting a communications software stack tailored to the needs of your Internet of Things design is crucial — and not necessarily easy, given that options are continually evolving. Read the whole thing here.

I recently read this article by John Carbone about using UDP in embedded systems. The advice in the article is accurate, but there are some other issues to consider when designing UDP based protocols in embedded systems that Carbone did not address. I wanted to tackle them here. First and foremost: UDP datagrams are trivial… View Article

We’d like to congratulate our client Skydrop for a spectacular launch at CES this week. The Skydrop Sprinkler Controller is a great example of a next-generation Internet-of-Things product.

Out of the box, Chromecast has no idea who I am, or what my available content is. In a few simple steps I’m up and running with my content. I didn’t even enter my username and password! How did Google do that? The answer involves a protocol called oAuth.

Attacks that are initially restricted to the realm of esoteric, government-backed spooks become accessible over time to run-of-the-mill cybercriminals. Take, for example, the Linux.Darlloz worm, which attacks embedded devices and is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it propagates by exploiting a vulnerability that was patched in May 2012. But the firmware images on many embedded devices are much older than that. The second reason I find it particularly interesting is it targets PHP, a scripting language largely used for web development.

I’ve got a new blog post up today at EE Times, discussing how to secure devices on the Internet of Things: It used to be academically interesting, perhaps, that an attacker could compromise an unconnected home thermostat. Today, it’s another thing entirely that an attacker can potentially target thousands of home thermostats from afar, determine… View Article

There’s a lot of buzz about the Internet of Things — a catchphrase designed to encompass a range of embedded devices that connect to cloud servers to act more intelligently than they could on their own. One problem that comes up is how to design the Thing to connect back to the Cloud Server — how does the Thing phone home? It’s tricky, because, usually, we are trying to balance several factors.

Our engineering expert details how to capture and analyze all the network traffic flowing to and from a Wi-Fi-enabled device using a network sniffer.