For IoT to realize its promise of revolutionizing the communications landscape, security concerns will need to be addressed, for commercial and consumer users, and across network, device, and application layers. IoT Forum members, telcos, telecom vendors, tech scouts, and investors meet in January to assess the risks, identify the challenges and opportunities, and discover the innovation and startups working to secure the IoT. Hosted by Kelley Drye. Sponsored by Dispel
Silicon Valley, California, January 22 2021/Meeting Recap/ The IoT Forum of the Telecom Council gathered online for our interactive meeting, this time around IoT Cybersecurity. The topic is front and center because, with Industry 4.0, the proliferation of connected devices, consumer and Industrial adoption, and 5G, the total area of the potential attack surface is growing rapidly, and exposing stakeholders to new and unexpected amounts of risk.
Our program began with a talk from Steve Augustino, of Kelley Drye, a law firm in DC that helps telecom players navigate the DC and regulatory environment. Steve discussed new requirements for IoT that the US Federal government plans to demand for all of their IoT contracts. The governmental hope is a very light-touch regulatory environment, build mostly on the scale of government demand: by requiring compliant products, the gov’t hopes that providers will end up just baking similar capabilities into ALL their products, even those directed at private customers. NIST is currently taking input on the requirements, and anyone interested could follow along, or even affect the requirement.
We learned from our panel about the specifics of the new attach surface from IoT, and of how and end-to-end view of security is best – providing both multiple layers, but also preventing bottlenecks, and still meeting business unit performance requirements. Digital transformation is a process that many industries are undertaking, and is essential to remain competitive, but as end-point IoT devices are connected, we must be sure that the networks that connect them are also intelligent enough to detect anomalies and defend. The networks, be they virtualized, SDN, or managed, must defend both themselves, and also the end devices. Some end devices that are high-value targets should have the security built-in, but other devices absolutely need to be minimal cost (to keep BoM down, reduce power demand), so the security might be provided in an aggregation point, like a gateway.
We moved, as usual, into a series of excellent rapid-fire presentations, where innovators introduced the audience to their products or service, and explained their competitive advantages. As always, our Members can access the meeting agenda and presentations in our Member Library.
To close the meeting, we ended with our trademark “soft close” where the official content ends, but we stick around for networking, and casual conversation in the virtual rooms. This meeting had some great après-content, where attendees discussed more IoT Cybersecurity issues, such as industry specifics, connected cars, etc. A big thanks to our sponsors, and all our great presenters.