Steven Woo, VP of Solutions Marketing at Rambus, recently participated in an Internet of Things (IoT) Summit panel discussion about the creation of new monetization opportunities in the burgeoning space. As Woo noted, chip design projects that once cost a few tens of millions of dollars a decade ago have jumped to $200 million or more. In addition, a significant increase in the number of IP blocks, use cases and configurations have created complex schedule risks and logistics challenges for chipmakers.
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New monetization opportunities for the IoT
Steven Woo, VP of Solutions Marketing at Rambus, recently participated in an Internet of Things (IoT) Summit panel discussion about the creation of new monetization opportunities in the burgeoning space.
As Woo noted, chip design projects that once cost a few tens of millions of dollars a decade ago have jumped to $200 million or more. In addition, a significant increase in the number of IP blocks, use cases and configurations have created complex schedule risks and logistics challenges for chipmakers.
“The IoT cannot reach its full potential based on the current paradigm of rising development costs and ever-decreasing margins,” he told conference attendees. “The industry must also begin thinking of security as a primary design goal, rather than as an afterthought.”
One potential approach, says Woo, is to create secure, reprogrammable chips that enable a Features as a Service (Faas) model. Simply put, FaaS unlocks the true – or full – value of the intellectual property present in chip designs.
“A big challenge for chip manufacturers is predicting demand, and this problem is compounded when there are multiple products to be managed. Rather than producing one chip for each product configuration and having to deal with issues such as missed estimates and holding inventory across a wide range of configurations, chipmakers can leverage Moore’s Law and make a single chip with a wide range of functionality and enable different sets of functions to meet the needs of each product category. OEMs and end customers can also enable additional features and services in the chip once it has left the manufacturing facility,” he explained. “We also see FaaS leveraging a silicon root of trust to securely enable and disable features and services in-field, opening up potential new usage models, with revenue flowing back through the supply chain.”
According to Woo, the success of the IoT is clearly contingent upon the benefits of connectivity outweighing the added costs and security risks. More specifically, chips will need to address a growing range of third-party security requirements, necessitating the ability to store and protect cryptographic keys and parameters that will vary by application and end customer.
“Reprogrammable chips, enabling FaaS, will allow system architects to significantly extend the range of markets they can address per chip design while exceeding customer requirements,” he said. “In addition, re-programmability reduces development and inventory management costs and can create new opportunities for downstream revenue.”
As Woo adds, there will be numerous ways of implementing this new model. However, gaining access to more of the industry’s downstream revenue will clearly be the start of a truly transformative change for many chipmakers in the context of the IoT.
Interested in learning about Features as a Service? You can check out our article archive on the subject here and the recent whitepaper titled “Charting a new course for semiconductors” here.
There is no giant Faraday cage for the IoT
A Faraday cage or Faraday shield can best be defined as an enclosure formed by conductive material that is used to block electric fields. As such, Faraday cages either heavily attenuate or block the reception and transmission of radio waves, which are a form of electromagnetic radiation.
There is no giant Faraday cage for the IoT
A Faraday cage or Faraday shield can best be defined as an enclosure formed by conductive material that is used to block electric fields. As such, Faraday cages either heavily attenuate or block the reception and transmission of radio waves, which are a form of electromagnetic radiation.
Image Credit: Frank Vincentz (Via Wikipedia)
Unfortunately, there is no Faraday cage large enough to shield the burgeoning Internet of Things and related infrastructure from certain hacks such as simple power analysis (SPA) and differential power analysis (DPA). To be sure, all physical electronic systems routinely leak information about their internal process of computing. In practical terms, this means attackers can exploit various side-channel techniques to gather data and extract secret cryptographic keys from IoT endpoints.
“Regardless of specific instruction set architecture (ISA), most industry security solutions on the market today can be soundly defeated by side-channel attacks,” said Simon Blake-Wilson, a VP at Rambus’ Cryptography Research Division. “In fact, even a simple radio is capable of gathering side-channel information by eavesdropping on frequencies emitted by electronic devices. In some cases, secret keys can be recovered from a single transaction clandestinely performed by a device several feet away.”
The burgeoning IoT already comprises millions, if not billions, of connected endpoints powered by chips that are vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Such unprotected silicon (e.g., CPUs, MCUs, MPUs) can be found in a wide range of electronic devices including wearables, medical equipment, vehicles, smart appliances and rapidly evolving smart city infrastructure.
Perhaps not surprisingly, vulnerable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are also gaining traction among IoT device manufacturers. Pankaj Rohatgi, a Security Technology Fellow at Rambus’ Cryptography Research Division, says the advantages of FPGAs include reduced time-to-market, field-configurability and lower up-front costs.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Oi9xNR60s]
“FPGAs are increasingly being relied upon to protect highly-sensitive intellectual property, trade-secrets, algorithms and cryptographic keys. They are also a natural fit for certain elements of the IoT,” he explained. “Sensitive FPGA applications – such as power grids, medical devices and semi-autonomous vehicle infrastructure – all require strong tamper resistance to protect both the secrets contained within these devices as well as the data they process.”
As Rohatgi confirms, power analysis attacks are among the most important to protect against, since they are non-invasive, widely understood by adversaries and easy to execute via inexpensive off-the-shelf equipment.
“Fortunately, specific DPA countermeasure strategies can be employed to protect FPGA-based IoT devices and related infrastructure,” he said. “These include techniques to minimize information leakage, generating noise to drown out leakage signals, the use of randomness to mask computational intermediates, algorithm and implementation obfuscation as well as the use of protocols designed to preserve secrecy even in the presence of (some) leakage.”
However, as Blake-Wilson emphasizes, side-channel attacks are only one specific attack vector threatening the IoT.
“The current security paradigm associated with the mobile and PC world is undeniably flawed. I find it difficult to believe that any serious industry player is honestly satisfied with the status quo, in which serious or even critical vulnerabilities disclosed on an almost daily basis are patched with hurriedly coded software and firmware updates,” he concluded. “A ‘good enough’ approach may have been tolerated for smartphones and tablets, but the industry cannot afford to relegate security to a tertiary concern for an IoT that may very well ultimately affect every aspect of our daily lives. A new paradigm, designed from the ground up to provide secure foundations for connected devices, is clearly long overdue. Devices need to be secured throughout their lifecycle from chip manufacture, to day-to-day deployment, to decommissioning. Alongside side channel attacks, secure provisioning and configuration are crucial issues that we are addressing with CryptoManager.”
Designing the eyes of the IoT
Rambus recently participated in the 4YFN Innovators Breakfast with IXDS and Bosch at the MWC (Fira Montjuic) MLove Lounge. During the event, Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel discussed his take on design thinking, with a focus on lensless smart sensors (LSS) and related partners-in-open-development (POD) initiatives.
Designing the eyes of the IoT
Rambus recently participated in the 4YFN Innovators Breakfast with IXDS and Bosch at the MWC (Fira Montjuic) MLove Lounge.
During the event, Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel discussed his take on design thinking, with a focus on lensless smart sensors (LSS) and related partners-in-open-development (POD) initiatives.
According to Nadel, it is essential for modern marketers to be intimately connected to both strategy and design. Indeed, understanding how a product will ultimately be used or deployed by customers and partners plays a direct role in influencing its development. This holistic approach makes it easier to successfully promote products when they hit the market.
To illustrate his point, Nadel highlighted the continuing evolution of Rambus’ lensless smart sensor technology.
Essentially, LSS offers a fundamentally new approach to imaging that shifts the function of traditional optics to computation and eliminates the need for expensive lenses by replacing them with tiny inexpensive diffractive gratings.
“The path to commercialization for LSS started off with the understanding that our lensless smart sensors technology would be an ingredient; an element of a stack that will ultimately be part of something bigger than itself,” he explained. “So we’ve thought very carefully about how LSS could be successfully integrated in future products.”
As Nadel notes, Rambus first introduced lensless smart sensor technology in 2014 as the ‘eyes of the IoT’; launched its LSS partners-in-open-development (POD) in 2015 for minimum viable product evaluation; and unveiled LSS thermal capabilities at MWC 2016.
Working with POD partners IXDS and frog, Rambus has explored three primary categories for LSS-enabled applications: virtual, augmented reality eyewear and head mounted displays (HMDs); automotive safety and comfort; and smart homes. The two design companies also developed a number of LSS-based prototypes in some of the above-mentioned categories.
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, LSS tech may very well help power versatile sensor clusters in next generation eye-tracking platforms and head-mounted displays (HMDs).
Indeed, LSS is capable of optimizing future eye-tracking hardware and HMDs via a combination of optimized industrial design and lower power requirements. More specifically, LSS can be mounted much closer to the eye than cameras. In addition, LSS-enabled Purkinje eye tracking, which employs fewer pixels than a focusing system, is actually more accurate than a camera with a traditional lens. Plus, VR goggles equipped with eye-tracking capabilities – such as those offered by LSS – are able to reduce computational requirements for rendering a specific scene.
In terms of smart homes, the tiny LSS form factor allows sensors to be directly embedded into existing products such as light bulbs and outlet covers, with a wide FOV enabling a single sensor to cover large areas.
LSS is also able to distinguish ‘target’ images using both optical presence and thermal signatures.
Meanwhile, for automotive safety and comfort, LSS is capable of optimizing airbag deployment by enabling systems to precisely identify occupant type, size and orientation.
Last, but certainly not least, lensless smart sensors could potentially be used to track driver and passenger body temperature for more personalized heating and cooling options.
Interested in learning more about Rambus lensless smart sensors? You can check out our LSS product page here and our article archive on the subject here.
