Soracom’s Mission: The Democratisation of IoT

Parag Mittal, Chief Commercial Officer, SORACOM

“Our focus is the democratisation of IoT. For me, the measure of success would be that Soracom is recognised not just for excellent commercial performance, but also for the work it has done to support the industry.”

Interview by Abraham Joseph, Editorial Director, IoT Insights

What is the origin of Soracom?

Soracom was founded in Japan in 2015 by three experts in telecommunications and cloud technologies, our CEO, Ken Tamagawa, our CTO Kenta Yasukawa and our COO Daichi Funato. We launched our service in Japan on 30 September 2015. From the onset, our objective was to develop a communications network that was optimised for IoT, with the performance and scalability to serve all customer groups. One year after launch, we had over 4000 clients. Today we have over 5000 clients. (Read more...)

Alcatel-Lucent Acquires Mformation for IOT Security and Device Management

17 September 2015 – Alcatel-Lucent today announced the acquisition of Mformation, a leading provider of mobile and ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) security and device management solutions for mobile operators, service providers and enterprises. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mformation, headquartered in Woodbridge, NJ, will be incorporated into Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Platforms organization, providing service providers and enterprises with a secure, scalable, application-independent IoT security and control platform for use across multiple industries including automotive, healthcare, utilities, manufacturing and the digital home.

Additionally, Mformation’s products will extend and enhance the capabilities of Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution to provide service providers with an integrated device management solution across home, mobile and enterprise networks. These end-to-end capabilities can address the increasing importance of the effective management and security for the 70 billion devices expected to connect to the Internet by 2020, and will simplify the management of converged networks expected to grow exponentially with the implementation of 5G.

Security concerns are on the rise as networks become increasingly virtualized, wireless devices become mainstay components of complex machines pervasive in every aspect of life, and unmanned connected devices become increasingly pervasive. The combination of Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive portfolio and Mformation together will allow network operators to manage endpoints and gateways, establishing an end-to-end IoT “chain of trust” built on industry best practices for authentication and data and network security.

“As connected devices become an ever increasing part of our social and economic fabric, we need to ensure that these devices, and the networks they navigate, are secure, reliable and efficient,” said Bhaskar Gorti, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Platforms (left). “Mformation’s cloud-enabled IoT platform will enable our customers to rapidly deploy IoT services that can be trusted and managed efficiently,”

“Our portfolio and our customer base are highly complementary to Alcatel-Lucent’s Internet of Things aspirations,” said Dr. Rakesh Kushwaha, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mformation (above right). “We look forward to leveraging our mobile and IoT security capabilities to enable customers to fully exploit the benefits of a connected world.”

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is the leading IP networking, ultra-broadband access and cloud technology specialist. We are dedicated to making global communications more innovative, sustainable and accessible for people, businesses and governments worldwide. Our mission is to invent and deliver trusted networks to help our customers unleash their value. Every success has its network.

About Mformation
Founded in 1999, Mformation is a pioneer and leader in mobility management solutions with more than 20 service provider customers around the world and managing more than 500 million devices.

Mformation provides service providers with a secure, scalable, application-independent IoT control platform that provides control and security across multiple industries including automotive, healthcare, utilities, manufacturing and the digital home.

Mformation provides service providers with deep technical expertise in device management standards and innovation in IoT protocol adaptation for connected devices.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

INSIDE Secure Launches World’s Smallest Security Solution for Internet of Things (IoT) Devices

3 August  2015 – INSIDE Secure, a leader in embedded security solutions for mobile and connected devices, today announced the availability of MatrixSSL Tiny, the world’s smallest Transport Layer Security (TLS) software implementation, to allow companies to secure IoT devices with stringent memory requirements. MatrixSSL Tiny has been deployed on IoT devices with less than 10 kilobytes of flash and 600 bytes of RAM. Moreover, with MatrixSSL Tiny, device manufacturers can reduce their overall design costs by retrofitting a secure connection to existing hardware as well as reduce bill of materials (BOM) costs.

“INSIDE Secure continues to be on the leading edge of meeting market requirements to secure the most critical applications, networks and devices,” said Martin Bergenwall, Executive Vice President of the Mobile Security Business Division, INSIDE Secure (above). “As the recent cyberattack on a Jeep® Cherokee communicated by wired.com shows, security for IoT devices is critical.”

First released in 2004, MatrixSSL is a secure Transport Layer Security (TLS) solution delivered in portable C source code. MatrixSSL Tiny is designed to secure small IoT devices with extremely limited memory that use remote connections, yet demand robust security to prevent eavesdropping and tampering on network traffic. MatrixSSL Tiny performs real time operations, zeroing the memory when finished.

“For a secure Internet of Things, it will be essential that the full range of connected devices with embedded intelligence – even down to the smallest sensor – has effective communications security embedded in it,” said Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO of specialist IoT analyst firm Beecham Research. “For devices using small micro-processors, there may be very limited memory and processing capability, yet even these require sufficiently sophisticated security features to cater to the increasingly threatening landscape. This is an exciting development from Inside Secure to help enable this demanding need. It helps to open up the growth potential of the IoT market.”

To learn more about MatrixSSL Tiny please visit: http://www.insidesecure.com/Products-Technologies/Protocol-Security-Toolkits/MatrixSSL-Tiny-Edition

About INSIDE Secure
INSIDE Secure (Euronext Paris FR0010291245 – INSD) provides comprehensive embedded security solutions. World-leading companies rely on INSIDE Secure’s mobile security and secure transaction offerings to protect critical assets including connected devices, content, services, identity and transactions. Unmatched security expertise combined with a comprehensive range of IP, semiconductors, software and associated services gives INSIDE Secure customers a single source for advanced solutions and superior investment protection.

Source: INSIDE Secure

Wind River Delivers Real-Time Virtualisation for IoT Device Development

28 July 2015 – Wind River®, a global leader in delivering software for the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced a major update to its real-time virtualisation offering that allows customers to further reduce cost and innovate connected devices. The update includes storage virtualisation capabilities, enhanced security capabilities, and expanded processor support.

Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks® is based on Wind River virtualisation technology and extends the scalability capabilities of VxWorks by integrating a real-time embedded, Type 1 hypervisor into the core of the real-time operating system (RTOS). Through embedded virtualisation, it allows VxWorks customers to consolidate multiple disparate workloads on a single processor. Critical in today's era of IoT, it helps to address the need for robust, safer and more secure partitioning across all market segments.

“Virtualisation is a key attribute in GE’s global vision for industrial control systems in the era of the Industrial Internet. It allows the GE businesses to combine their real-time control logic, HMI, security, and cloud connectivity into a single platform,” said Wes Skeffington, principal engineer at GE. “Wind River’s virtualisation offering provides the right attributes like scalability, storage virtualisation, real-time behavior, virtual machine isolation, and security capabilities to realize this vision.”

Updates to Virtualization Profile for VxWorks include the following:

• Storage virtualisation through VirtIO allows devices to share a single storage controller, even a single disk, such as a Serial ATA device between multiple virtual machines (VMs), thereby dramatically reducing cost and complexity for consolidated systems. The run-time configuration, combined with support for the VirtIO device virtualisation framework makes the virtualisation profile a flexible and highly customizable virtualisation layer for embedded devices.
• Enhanced security capabilities include seamless integration with the Security Profile for VxWorks. These capabilities help customers to guard security from power-on all the way through VM load and beyond with secure boot, secure load, and data encryption during transmission and after shutdown.
• Expanded processor support includes support for Intel® Atom and Celeron architectures, providing even greater choices for customers to build product lines that scale from low end controllers to major gateways and high performance compute and display stations.

“Embedded virtualization allows customers to meet the challenges of the IoT era; it enables a future-proof architecture that can adapt and evolve to meet changing market requirements, customer needs, and technology advancements,” said Dinyar Dastoor, vice president and general manager of operating system platforms at Wind River (above). “With these latest virtualisation and security capability enhancements, Wind River has further strengthened VxWorks as the leading RTOS for IoT where connectivity, scalability and the ability to develop safer and more secure environments are paramount.”

The Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks is an integral part of the Intel Industrial Solutions System Consolidation Series, a production-ready, virtualisation software stack used for running an assortment of industrial and IoT workloads on a single platform.

More information about Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks is available at http://tinyurl.com/VxWorksVirtualization. And to learn more about how Wind River is addressing the opportunities and challenges of IoT, visit http://tinyurl.com/WindHelix.

About Wind River
Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), is a global leader in delivering software for the Internet of Things. The company has been pioneering computing inside embedded devices since 1981, and its technology is found in more than 2 billion products. Wind River offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for addressing the system-level challenges and opportunities of IoT that is backed by world-class global professional services, award-winning customer support, and a broad partner ecosystem. Wind River delivers the software and expertise that enables the innovation and deployment of safe, secure, and reliable intelligent systems. To learn more, please visit www.windriver.com.

Source: Wind River

Icon Labs Launches Security Management System

28 July 2015 — Icon Labs, a leading provider of embedded networking and security technology, today announced the release of its Floodgate Security Manager (FSM ), a security management software suite specifically designed to protect IoT and embedded devices against cyber-attack. FSM can be operated as either an on premise or a cloud-based security manager.

The Floodgate Security Manager provides device status monitoring, security policy management, command audit logging, and security event logging and reporting for devices running Icon Labs’ Floodgate Agent or other lightweight IoT management protocols such as COAP and MQTT.

Floodgate Security Manager provides comprehensive reporting and auditing capabilities to help achieve EDSA Certification, ISA/IEC 62443 Compliance, and/or compliance with the NIST Cybersecurity framework.

“The current approach to security management for IoT devices is to repurpose legacy security management systems.  While this solution works for some IoT gateways and other large IoT devices, it does not scale to the smallest IoT devices, especially small battery powered edge devices and sensor solutions,” says Alan Grau, President and Cofounder of Icon Labs (above). “Floodgate Security Manager is designed to provide the management services required by all IOT devices, including small, battery powered and mobile devices without the overhead and complexity of traditional enterprise security management systems.”

“With the IoT growing dramatically, it’s only a matter of time before hackers turn more attention toward embedded systems with limited onboard security resources,” said Steve Hoffenberg, a Director at industry analyst firm VDC Research. “New security technologies are needed not only to protect IoT device functionality and data, but also to protect conventional IT and the cloud assets to which the embedded systems are connected.”

Icon Labs products provide embedded security for IoT and Machine to Machine (M2M) solutions such as aerospace, military and space probes, industrial and medical control devices, medical systems, and consumer electronics products. The Floodgate Security Framework provides a “defense in depth” solution that protects control units and endpoint devices from cyber threats, aids in compliance with regulatory mandates and guidelines, and gathers and reports command, event and device status information for audit requirements.

About Icon Laboratories, Inc.
Icon Labs, a 2014 Gartner “Cool Vendor” and 2015 Gartner “Select Vendor”, is a leading provider of embedded software for device security, device protection and networking management, including the award winning Floodgate Defender. Founded in 1992, Icon Labs is headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa. For more information, please visit www.iconlabs.com.

Source: Icon Labs