Internet of things (IoT) is our future. It’s basically a network of many physical devices, such as gadgets, home appliances, vehicles, buildings, etc, wirelessly connected to the IoT. It’s expected that, by the year 2020, about 20.8 billion devices will be connected to the IoT. While it’s true the IoT will make our lives easier, it’s also true that many everyday devices will become targets of hackers and attackers unless we find a way to close the security gaps in internet-connected households.
This is why many internet experts are working on improving the security of IoT. Some of them are from Germany and they are developing new methods for discovering and fixing vulnerabilities in the applications that are equipped with different types of processors and different types of software.
For example, an Intel processor in a traditional computer understands more than 500 commands, but a microcontroller in an electronic key is able to process about 20 commands. Also, same instructions are represented as different sequences of ones and zeros in the binary language of two processor types. This makes an automated analysis of many different devices very difficult and potentially useless.
In order to solve this issue, German experts are translating different binary languages into an intermediate language. They have been successful in implementing this approach for three different processor types: Intel, MIPS, ARM. Then, they look for security-critical programming errors on the intermediate language level and try to automatically close the security gaps.
This approach is expected to be completely processor-independent by the time the IoT project is wrapped up in the year 2020.
Chanwoo's Weekly Tech 