Autonomous Security Platform Designed for IoT Self Defense -- ADTmag

Autonomous Security Platform Designed for IoT Self Defense

By Richard Seeley
October 10, 2019

A new security platform that "enables IoT devices to defend themselves against hackers without the need for human intervention" is being demonstrated by NXM Labs, Inc. this week at Arm TechCon 2019 in San Jose, Calif.

The platform based on Arm chips is designed to provide security, privacy protection and data integrity for IoT devices, NXM stated in announcing the demonstrations. The company calls its product "a chip-to-cloud software platform that leverages the advanced security features of today's chips."

NXM Autonomous Security is certified by the Platform Security Architecture (PSA) organization, which provides security evaluation for chip vendors, OS providers and IoT device makers. The NXM product is aimed at brand manufacturers seeking to deliver security, data integrity and privacy protection in IoT devices.

"NXM automates security processes to eliminate human error, a leading cause of cybersecurity breaches," the announcement states. "To ensure data privacy, NXM automatically bifurcates machine-generated data from personally identifiable information, giving the OEM the option of storing data in compliance with privacy regulations, including GDPR and California's new IoT security law. In the rare event that a device's security is ever compromised, the system can reset a device's encryption keys allowing the device to resume normal operation with restored security. This same technology platform will be capable of protecting devices against rapidly evolving cyber threats from future quantum computers."

San Francisco and Toronto-based NXM announced that it is doing two demonstrations at the ARM event. The first will use blockchain and agile crypto technologies secured by Arm TrustZone technology on an STM32 L5, Cortex-M33 based chip from STMicroelectronics combined with Microsoft's Azure IoT Hub. The second demo will feature "quantum-safe encryption enabled by the ISARA Radiate Quantum-safe Toolkit and provided through NXM's Agile Crypto microservice on a M33-class board."

"NXM Autonomous Security is about simplifying and automating security to enable machines to defend themselves," Scott Rankine, NXM CEO, stated in the announcement. "It frees OEMs to focus their resources on building new products secure in the knowledge that their brand reputation and customer's privacy are protected."

For readers unfamiliar with ARM, a Wikipedia article explains: "ARM, previously Advanced RISC Machine, originally Acorn RISC Machine, is a family of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. Arm Holdings develops the architecture and licenses it to other companies, who design their own products that implement one of those architectures‍—‌including systems-on-chips (SoC) and systems-on-modules (SoM) that incorporate memory, interfaces, radios, etc. It also designs cores that implement this instruction set and licenses these designs to a number of companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products."

The site for this week's Arm TechCon states that it expects to host more than 3,500 attendees for educational programs aimed at developers, engineers, architects, product designers and executives.