(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Some of the smallest electronics have big security problems. One of the biggest known brute-force attacks in internet history, in 2016, took down broad swaths of the web across North America and Europe with phony traffic signals generated by tens of thousands of smart baby monitors, webcams, and the like. These typically innocuous devices lack the security of your laptop or phone, making them 8 billion possible sources of trouble.
Louis Parks says he has the answer. Parks runs SecureRF Corp., a 20-employee startup in Shelton, Conn., that sells software aimed at safeguarding the so-called internet of things. The pitch revolves around efficiency: SecureRF’s code is clean enough to run powerful software on what can often be pretty weak hardware. “The nature of our math allows us to work with smaller numbers and simpler processes,” he says.
There’s a surprising amount of math involved. Online security typically relies largely on exchanges of public and private “keys,” large numbers that can be used to generate shared secret codes, authenticating identities and encrypting communications. Smart devices are often easy to hack because they don’t have the battery life to handle powerful chips and struggle to use standard public and private keys. Instead, such devices typically rely on passwords that don’t secure traffic between them and the internet.
SecureRF’s authentication and encryption are easier for processors to handle without being easier to hack. Whereas standard software requires calculation of numbers with as many as 256 binary digits, or bits, SecureRF’s streamlined algorithms work just as well with 8-bit numbers. The result, says the company, is security that runs 100 times faster on low-power chips than conventional software, while using half the memory. Although other groups have been working on low-power security software, they’ve been academic efforts mostly in the realm of pure research. SecureRF is licensing its technology for use with Intel Corp. and rival chipmakers Arm Ltd. and STMicroelectronics NV. “I think they’re making the right moves,” says Mike Demler, senior analyst at researcher the Linley Group. Until now, he says, smart-device security “always focused on the chip itself, not the communications between chips.”
Parks’s company has spent more than a decade quietly researching ways to defend a range of mobile communications technologies, including radio-frequency identification chips and near-field communication. The team shifted its attention when smart devices began to proliferate in the early 2010s. Now it’s working to refine its software and counting on fees from semiconductor makers, starting at a few cents per chip, depending on volume. Your next baby monitor may protect more than your child.
To contact the author of this story: Michael Belfiore in New York at michael@michaelbelfiore.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeff Muskus at jmuskus@bloomberg.net.
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