Trust is the key to achieving the promise of trillions of IoT devices

A con­flu­ence of events is accel­er­at­ing the inter­net of things (IoT) and its poten­tial to trans­form busi­ness­es, indus­tries and wider soci­ety. While devices are get­ting cheap­er, low­er pow­ered and more func­tion­al, coro­n­avirus has forced organ­i­sa­tions and con­sumers online much faster than any­body would have expect­ed. The result is a clear oppor­tu­ni­ty to reach a tril­lion IoT devices glob­al­ly in the next 15 years.

There is one over­ar­ch­ing chal­lenge stand­ing in the way: trust. IoT promis­es a huge amount of val­ue to busi­ness­es, indus­tries and wider soci­ety, enabling mon­u­men­tal effi­cien­cies, incred­i­ble new inno­va­tions and vital advance­ments in sus­tain­abil­i­ty. But it is fun­da­men­tal that IoT devices and the insights they gen­er­ate can be real­ly trust­ed.

A tril­lion may sound like a lot, but it starts with small devices gen­er­at­ing tiny amounts of data. Scary sto­ries in the media can quick­ly fuel wari­ness and, if peo­ple don’t trust those indi­vid­ual devices, the whole idea of big data is pol­lut­ed and the oppor­tu­ni­ty is lost. To achieve trust on a large scale, it first needs to be baked into every sin­gle device.

“To get trust in a device, you have to build it in from the start,” says Vin­cent Korstan­je, chief exec­u­tive of Kigen, the secu­ri­ty leader for cel­lu­lar IoT. “A SIM is a vital tech­nol­o­gy for trust. A lot of the inter­net now runs on two-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion and that runs on SIM. It gives a device an iden­ti­ty. To achieve trust, you then need to track where a device has been, who is load­ing soft­ware onto it and what its life cycle is. But it all starts with iden­ti­ty.”

Peo­ple are famil­iar with SIMs as the small cards in their mobile phone, pro­vid­ing the con­nec­tiv­i­ty to make calls and use data. If you change your mobile net­work provider, you take the SIM out and put a new one in. Yet while this may work well for mobile, it is huge­ly imprac­ti­cal to design holes for SIM cards into IoT devices, many of which need to with­stand harsh envi­ron­ments and in the future could be as small as a grain of rice.

With this in mind, Kigen invest­ed heav­i­ly in stan­dard­i­s­a­tion and pio­neered inte­grat­ed SIM (iSIM) tech­nol­o­gy, which pro­vides the strongest foun­da­tion of iden­ti­ty for secure cel­lu­lar IoT. When the IoT devices are tiny, remote and updat­ed over the air, their lifes­pan is restrict­ed by their bat­tery life, putting high demand on effi­cien­cy. Kigen’s iSIM offers 70 per cent low­er pow­er con­sump­tion than a tra­di­tion­al SIM, mak­ing it suit­able for all devices to be kinder to the plan­et too.

Some of the first prod­ucts based on Kigen’s iSIM tech­nol­o­gy include an inno­v­a­tive smart label now used by phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and life sci­ences firm Bay­er to con­stant­ly mon­i­tor the sta­tus of its prod­ucts and receive imme­di­ate insight into their glob­al inven­to­ry. The smart label con­nects via pub­lic mobile net­works and deliv­ers a con­tin­u­ous ser­vice for three years, stream­lin­ing Bayer’s oper­a­tions. The idea of a paper-thin con­nect­ed device is strik­ing, but Kigen’s iSIM tech­nol­o­gy is also going into con­nect­ed con­sumer elec­tron­ics, health­care and even smart street­lights.

What stands out about Kigen is that as a provider of secure oper­at­ing sys­tems and enabler for advanced con­nec­tiv­i­ty, it is dri­ving this change through a stan­dard­ised path for device­mak­ers. This derisks their path so they can focus on enabling new busi­ness mod­els and increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

“Every IoT device should have an iSIM in it,” says Korstan­je. “It’s a frac­tion of a square mil­lime­tre on the sil­i­con so the deci­sion on if your prod­uct will ever use IoT becomes easy. iSIM is trust­ed as it imple­ments cer­tifi­cate based secu­ri­ty, and allows the devices to be updat­ed over-the-air, which are both impor­tant for trust. iSIM enables secu­ri­ty every­where, while its small size makes it prac­ti­cal and afford­able.”

By dri­ving down the cost and pow­er, and increas­ing the per­for­mance, iSIM tech­nol­o­gy unlocks all kinds of IoT use-cas­es to come to life, in grow­ing areas such as smart cities, ebikes and escoot­ers, and equal­ly in more tra­di­tion­al indus­tries such as health­care, ship­ping and retail. IoT is becom­ing core to these indus­tries, but they don’t man­u­fac­ture in the same way as the smart­phone or PC indus­tries. 

Kigen is look­ing to do for IoT what its par­ent com­pa­ny Arm did for smart­phones. Arm pio­neered a new way smart­phones could be man­u­fac­tured, with intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty for the sil­i­con mar­ket, licens­ing a chip design so mul­ti­ple ven­dors could col­lab­o­rate, com­pete and bring dif­fer­ent solu­tions to mar­ket. 

The com­pa­ny is bring­ing a sim­i­lar hor­i­zon­tal play to IoT, allow­ing mul­ti­ple solu­tions to come to mar­ket much faster in areas such as health­care and smart meter­ing. By mak­ing iSIM the foun­da­tion of embed­ded trust for all IoT, tra­di­tion­al busi­ness­es can have the free­dom to man­u­fac­ture through their pre­ferred sup­pli­ers and deliv­er ser­vices that mat­ter most to their cus­tomers.

“We make IoT pos­si­ble through the whole sup­ply chain, enabling a high­ly flex­i­ble approach both for the busi­ness mod­el and for how peo­ple can use our tech­nol­o­gy” says Korstan­je. “We need to look at the sup­ply chain as a mul­ti­tude of play­ers com­ing togeth­er and play­ing togeth­er, where every­body around the world can bring their best com­po­nents to those devices and make a tril­lion devices a real­i­ty.”

Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion not only has huge promise to make all our lives bet­ter but also is increas­ing­ly crit­i­cal to our fab­ric of life as has been high­light­ed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. How­ev­er, with IoT, there is just so much more to come. That’s tril­lions of devices help­ing us live our lives in incred­i­ble ways. Though busi­ness­es need to inno­vate and col­lab­o­rate so they can solve the trust conun­drum for every­one involved.

Sources:

^[1] Based on August 2020 data, per the GSMA Intel­li­gence IoT rev­enue: state of the mar­ket 2020 report

^[2] IoT Con­nec­tions are defined as con­nect­ed cars, smart home devices, con­nect­ed indus­tri­al equip­ment, where­as non-IoT con­nec­tions con­sid­er smart­phones, lap­tops, and com­put­ers.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it kigen.com or sign up to our upcom­ing webi­nar at kigen.com/solving-iot-trust

Pro­mot­ed by Kigen