standards Archives

Tag: standards

AllSeen Alliance Announces Smart Lighting Framework

October 8, 2014 Paul Roberts

Smart lightbulbs aren’t anything new. In fact, products like the Philips Hue bulb have been in the market for years. The devices, which typically couple a standard incandescent or CF bulb with a wireless transmitter, allow lights to be managed via mobile device and also respond to environmental changes monitored by other sensors. But – as with much of the Internet of Things – each family of smart bulbs is something of an island: interacting- and communicating mostly with other smart home products from the same manufacturer. That’s good for the lightbulb maker, but bad for smart home advocates, see out-of-the box connectivity across product silos as a precursor to broad adoption of smart home technologies. It’s also been the case that the products that have been released have often fallen short in areas like security. In August, 2013, security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani disclosed a proof of concept hack […]

Tech and Telecoms Fight to dominate ‘Internet of Things’ – FT.com

October 7, 2014 Paul Roberts

The Financial Times has an interesting piece on the ongoing push and pull to develop cross-industry tech standards to govern the Internet of of Things. The article, by Daniel Thomas makes note of efforts by companies including Arm, Google and Vodafone to secure leading positions in the technology infrastructure that will provide connections to smart devices, even as firms like Apple and Google dominate the market for mobile devices and wearables that are at the vanguard of IoT. “The fragmentation and lack of technology standards could provide the biggest opportunity for telecoms operators in a fast-evolving industry already changing how people live,” says Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum tells FT. “There is a clear opportunity for an aggregator who is able to interconnect the myriad inoperable devices.” The article makes mention of the newly released ETSI specifications for Internet of Things (IoT) networks dedicated to low throughput communications. You can […]

Online Authentication Group FIDO Alliance Grabs A Big Bone: Alibaba

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

The FIDO Alliance, an up-and-coming industry consortium aimed at simplifying online identity and doing away with passwords added IPO darling Alibaba to its Board of Directors, according to a statement on Tuesday. The FIDO (or “Fast IDentity Online”) Alliance announced that Alibaba Group’s payments business, Alipay will be among the first to deploy FIDO technology for secure payments authentication. On September 17, the company announced that it will use Nok Nok Labs’ FIDO-compliant NNL™ S3 Authentication Suite to enable secure online payments via the Fingerprint Sensor (FPS) technology on the Samsung Galaxy S5. Alipay customers will be able to make payments and transfers using Alipay’s mobile application, Alipay Wallet by applying their fingerprint to the Galxy’s fingerprint sensor. “We look forward to participating on the FIDO Alliance board, and assuring that commerce and authentication are uniquely cooperative and seamlessly compatible,” said Ni Liang, Alibaba group, senior director, department of security, in a statement. Mobile payments […]

The Key to Security in the Internet of Things – IEEE Spectrum

September 19, 2014 Paul Roberts

IEEE Spectrum has an article that provides a nice overview of security and privacy issues on the Internet of Things. The article by Mark Anderson highlights a number of the issues that have cropped up on these pages as well, namely: the rush to market in the consumer IoT space (much of it driven by crowd funding sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter) the lack of a strong business case for (consumer) manufacturers to build security into IoT products the tendency of large manufacturers to pursue siloed security standards that thwart efforts to build devices interconnect with other IoT infrastructure (other devices, routers, etc.) So far efforts to coordinate IoT development around a single platform or set of standards have been reduced to predictable turf battles: Google’s Thread versus multi-vendor efforts like TheAllSeen Alliance, The Open Interconnect Consortium, The Industrial Internet Consortium versus Apple HomeKit and HealthKit and others. In the […]

IEEE Issues Standard For Sensors, Tiny Machines

September 10, 2014 Paul Roberts

A new standard published by the IEEE may accelerate the spread and use of the Internet of Things: providing a common reference to govern the performance of microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS. The standard, IEEE 2700-2014, was recently approved by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board. It will provide a common methodology for specifying the performance of tiny sensors that are becoming more and more common in consumer electronics and other industries. That should make it easier for vendors , including Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to begin integrating two or more sensors without having to worry about integration challenges. The standards apply to a wide range of small sensors that currently populate everything from mobile phones to wearable devices like Apple’s newly announced smart watch. These include accelerometers, magnetometers, gyrometers and gyroscopes, barometers and other pressure sensors, humidity sensors, temperature sensors, ambient light sensors and proximity sensors, IEEE said. “The industry has been struggling […]