By Art Swift
President, prpl Foundation
Last week, we had the privilege of meeting with a delegation from the German defense industry to share how prpl members are working to build security in to the future IoT from the silicon level up. I was joined at this briefing by Cesare Garlati, prpl’s chief security strategist, and Majid Bemanian, director of vertical markets for prpl platinum member, Imagination Technologies.
The German delegation was composed of representatives of German Ministry of Defense (BMVg), branches/services and German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) as well as partners from academia/research and industry. The purpose of the German MoD CyberSecurity US Study Tour is to enable and foster exchange with governmental entities, research & academia, industry and emerging technologies. Earlier in the year we were approached by one of the delegation’s organizers who was familiar with prpl’s security work, and asked to provide this briefing.
Hosted at Citrix’s beautiful Executive Briefing Center in Santa Clara, with support from both local and German Citrix personnel, more than 25 senior executives and officers were present. In our 90 minute presentation, I introduced the activities of prpl, followed by Cesare’s demo of the prpl security framework using the MIPS-based PIC32Mz microcontroller, and Majid’s presentation of our work on the Trust Continuum.
Given the mix of participants, with experts from all parts of the German defense industry value chain, we were delighted that our presentations on the prpl Security Framework and Trust Continuum garnered a high degree of interest from the study tour participants. And of course, we were very happy to have had the opportunity to highlight the work of some of our member companies:
- Hypervisors from prpl member companies KernKonzept and Seltech as well as the open source pprlHypervisor from the PUCRS in Brazil
- PUF technology from member company Intrinsic-ID
- Trust Management capabilities from Intercede
- PicoTCP small footprint TCP/IP stack from member Altran
- MIPS processor IP with support for Hardware enforced virtualization from Imagination
There have already been follow-up questions and comments from the delegation, and we will be making some introductions for them to our member companies.