Open Standards with Open Security
May 21, 2015, Imagination Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Art Swift from the prpl foundation talked about a new frontier in information security and the need to move to hardware-based security for SoCs. The founding member of the foundation is Imagination.
The security industry is facing many new challenges, many related to the users’ inertia in updating firmware and operating systems. Even though many people have gateways or routers, most are using the original firmware and default authorization settings. As a result, information security is broken. IT users are spending over $77 B on security tools and yet the number of breaches continues to climb.
Cyber crime may be causing over $700 B in losses and another $300 B is lost in IP theft. In 99.9 percent of cases, the breach was due to a known vulnerability. To make maters worse, now many of the most virulent and insidious attacks are coming from a changing threat landscape, from state sponsors and not from script kids.
These targeted attacks account for 70-90 percent of all corporate attacks and many are phishing attacks. The idea for a phishing attack is to get the user to open something that looks like it is from a known entity. This tactic works abut 23 percent of the time, providing the attacker with new avenues to steal credentials for other lateral attacks. Other types of breach attempts include persistent attacks that take a lot of patience while very small tidbits drizzle back to the criminal.
As a result of al the attack vectors, systems need to change their approach to security and build it into the hardware. This change ensures that multi-domain threats are minimized and multi-tenant communications that include the ISP, shared WiFi, utilities, and over-the-top content providers to each be in separate, secure environments. The security approach needs to be an open framework, to enable many users and providers to contribute new solutions to the security puzzle.
The secure systems will also provide other functions and the underlying hardware will require a complete set of secure IP blocks. The first will be the MIPS CPU families, and other IP will be added over time. The MIPS core is a good pick for the CPU due to its ability for multi-threading and concurrency, both of which are important for the virtualization hardware that protects the rest of the system.
More information is available from the prpl foundation. Look at the website http://prplfoundation.org/ Security is the next frontier for the systems of the future.
