Next week, developers from a range of companies will convene at the Internet of Things Developers Conference in Santa Clara, chaired by long-time embedded systems expert Markus Levy.

According to organizers, “…Some will argue that the Internet of Things is nothing new, and in some respects they’re right. Machine-to-machine methods, (or M2M), intelligent embedded and/or smart fusion have been around in some form for many years. What’s different today is the level of integration.

M2M is the capability for machines (typically industrial) to use network resources to communicate with remote application infrastructure for monitoring and management tasks. The Internet of Things (IoT) goes way beyond this capability and interconnects virtually unlimited numbers of smart objects and changes the way we interact with our environment. Essentially, IoT is a merging of the physical and digital worlds.”

We here at TCG are looking at the IoT world and noting a distinct lack of trust and resulting security. Just last week, our members showed a number of demonstrations about how existing trusted computing standards, including the TPM and the TNC network security architecture, can be applied to today’s IoT use cases. Also last week, TCG demonstrated a way to securely upgrade automobiles remotely, with the TPM and TNC offering security for software updates.

Stacy Cannady, Cisco Systems and co-chair of TCG’s IoT group, will speak to attendees of the IoT Devcon, will discuss how to secure the IoT with trusted computing, noting key areas of trusted computing that can be applied to the IoT, tools to do so and tips for making it all work together.

The conference also will include talks from Freescale, Cisco, WindRiver Systems, Qualcomm and many others.
For more info, go to http://www.iot-devcon.com/.

TCG is also seeking comment on its new publication that offers guidance for securing the IoT. You can see the document and offer comments here:https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/resources/tcg_guidance_for_securing_iot