Welcome to the ASSURED interview series, in which we are talking about the future of security in next-generation smart connectivity systems comprising heterogeneous IoT and other types of cyber-physical systems.
Our first expert interview featured Thanassis Giannetsos from UBITECH, one of the ASSURED project partners. Thanassis is the technical coordinator of ASSURED, who together with his team, is designing new operational assurance mechanisms for these types of systems by converting them into hardware-based roots of trust.
Thanassis told us more about the ASSURED project, which, as the name suggests, is about safeguarding the operational assurance of IoT systems. More specifically, we have discussed about the future of security in next-generation smart connectivity systems comprising heterogeneous IoT and other types of cyber-physical systems. Such deployments constitute the cornerstone for evolving sectors, like manufacturing, smart city gateways, aerospace, autonomous vehicles, etc. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to converge their security and safety by assessing dynamic trust relationships and defining the necessary trust models based on which involved entities can establish trust for cooperatively executing safety-critical functions.
This could be summarised as the ASSURED vision. To fully understand the importance of the project, we dived deeper into the ever increasing attack vector that can be exploited by attackers and that has led to recent exploits. And this also includes roots-of-trust, such as trusted execution environments or trusted platform modules (TPMs), as sw- and hw-based security elements, which are essential to establish a verifiable chain of trust throughout the entire application stack of the target system. In other words, ASSURED tries to build up and ensure the correct behaviour and execution of the IoT systems throughout their entire lifecycle by building mechanisms that provide verifiable evidence on the system’s correct operation even against very strong adversaries.
Watch the full interview to learn more!
Stay tuned to hear from other experts. The second interview featuring Ahmad Atamli from NVIDIA is now available here.