There appears to be one company that thinks they can secure the IoT from to end to end. Their approach to delivering on this is to build something that is easy for manufacturers of IoT-based solutions to integrate at the software level. The reality is that what we have now is a whole lot of different devices in different industries sending and receiving data. Regardless of the data’s origin or its destination, the data needs to be protected between the device that produces it and the device that receives it. The story below details how the Swiss cryptography firm, Teserakt, is trying to accomplish this herculean feat.
End-to-end encryption is a staple of secure messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. It ensures that no one—even the app developer—can access your data as it traverses the web. But what if you could bring some version of that protection to increasingly ubiquitous—and notoriously insecure—Internet of Things devices?
The Swiss cryptography firm Teserakt is trying just that. Earlier this month at the Real World Crypto conference in New York it introduced E4, a sort of cryptographic implant that IoT manufacturers can integrate into their servers. Today most IoT data is encrypted at some point as it moves across the web, but it’s challenging to keep that protection consistent for the whole ride. E4 would do most of that work behind the scenes, so that whether companies make home routers, industrial control sensors, or web cams, all the data transmitted between the devices and their manufacturers can be encrypted.