IoT Evolution Wrap Up

UPDATE : Application Note posted at http://prpl.works/application-note-july-2016/

Last week, the prpl Foundation took to the stage at IoT Evolution Expo in Las Vegas to present a workshop on the prpl Security Framework, during which we revealed a demonstration of the framework in practice. It was a series of firsts, as the use of the prplHypervisor™ was put into practice as well as prplPUF™ and prplSecureInterVM™.

Cesare Garlati, chief security strategist at prpl Foundation demonstrated the prplHypervisor™ on Thursday July 14^th at 9AM, as part of a prplSecurity™ workshop on the IoT Developer track. The demo was a joint development effort of three key prpl members: Intrinsic-ID, Altran and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS).

Garlati showed three virtual machines connecting to the Internet and securely controlling a robotic arm. A MIPS M5150 CPU powers the PIC32 microcontroller to run the prpl hypervisor and thus securely isolates each application in its own virtual machine (VM). VM #1 receives commands from the Internet via Altran’s picoTCP listener, VM #2 authenticates the request via Intrinsic-ID’s implementation of the prplPUF™ API, and then relies authenticated valid command to VM #3, which is responsible for the real time control of the robotic arm via USB. The three VMs are completely separated and communicate within the system via the prplSecureInterVM™ communications APIs.

The general application concept is shown in the figure below:

As well as this successful demo, Art Swift, president of the prpl Foundation chaired an informative and well-received panel discussion on an open source approach to security the Internet of Things. The esteemed panel consisted of representatives of leading IoT companies, Dr. Pim Tuyls, CEO of Intrinsic-ID, Phil Attfield, CTO of Sequitur Labs, and Lubna Dajani, futurist and chief strategy officer of Intercede. Stay tuned for more about this enlightening debate on how we should be collaborating on the basics in IoT and only compete on the value-added differentiators when developing connected devices.