Our Future Needs Better Security

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Imagine a world populated by all kinds of devices, each one specialized in doing something to help you. Those devices would be all around you, in every aspect of your life. You would have some at home, helping you with different house chores. Others would help you at work, to be more productive, to make better decisions. Or they would just help create a relaxed ambiance when you take a break.

That is the technological utopia that some people are dreaming of, while others are scared to shiver by it. History taught us that each new type of technology is a double-edged sword. It can be used to do good or harm.

What if technology turns against you?

What if the devices that were meant to improve every aspect of your life would suddenly turn against you? Maybe someone from your past wants to see you suffer. Or maybe someone wants to play a bad prank on you. How would you protect yourself against them? And if you cannot prevent bad people from taking total control over them, is it still worth having them around you?

New technology always brings new problems to be solved. To solve them, you need new methods and new thinking. This is also real in the domain of cybersecurity. The Internet of things devices are already all around us: our phones, laptops, smart lights, smart cameras, the robot that cleans our kitchen floor, and even our electronic doors that keep us safe in our home or car. In the future, we will have more and more of those types of devices around us, in every aspect of our lives. This raises the question: How will we retain our privacy and security, with so much technology around us?

The answer to that question is: with new cybersecurity technology, which we (as users) can control. To feel safe, you need to be able to control the devices that are in your home, in a simple and intuitive manner. As simple as pressing a button on your phone. You do not want someone from the outside who you do not know or trust, to control your devices. You want to be assured that firstly, your devices are safe from outside attackers, and secondly that you can connect and disconnect them from the outside world whenever you like.

There is only one way to ensure that kind of security and control: building hardware that is specialized in defending your devices from the outside world and that gives you control over them. A physical device, one that you see, knows where it is and what it does. One that you can turn on and off and customize.

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The curse of the cloud

But then, what about the cloud? Your new artificially intelligent companions “think” by sending the inputs they get to the cloud, for processing. But why would someone willingly send data from their homes to someone else’s cloud? That data can be intercepted by someone who wants to spy on you. It may be stored and used for a big company’s marketing machine, so they can better predict your way of thinking. Or it could just be sold, along with other people’s data on the dark web.

There are 2 solutions to this problem:

* You can build your own servers from which you would relatively safely control your devices

or

*You can have every device process everything locally.

The first option would require a big amount of initial investment, and maintenance cost and it would use up space — not viable unless you have a lot of money.

The second option would enable everyone to have smart devices around them. You only need the artificially intelligent device that would be able to process most things locally and that would solve it all.

That is easy to say, but how can we have so much processing power on each of our devices? Will we always keep them plugged into our walls, as their batteries will not be able to handle all the energy required to keep them “alive”?

Using the current processing technology — our very resilient and versatile, but power-hungry binary computer — we will always be bound to use the cloud to make our devices think, or ever complain about the short life of our devices and the umbilical cord attached to our baby devices.

To solve this, we need a new computing paradigm. Not to replace, but to aid our binary computers. We need to move to specialized hardware for artificial intelligence and edge computing. A new type of processing unit that imitates the most efficient processing unit of all: the human brain.

From Unsplash

The brain of your devices — Neuromorphic computing

Even though it all seems like wishful thinking, this new type of processing unit is not so far away from reality. In 2009 Hewlett-Packard (HP) researchers created a new type of passive electrical component called the memristor. This component has some very interesting properties that are very useful for both cybersecurity and processing.

In cybersecurity, they can be used to generate true-random numbers, which are critical in cybersecurity. This has a multitude of uses, as each memristor is unique and different from the others. They can be used as a unique device fingerprint, encryption, electronic seal, etc. Each of those use cases is critical in protecting any system.

The ground-breaking use-case for memristors is much more interesting. They behave like one of the building blocks of the human brain: the neuron. The human brain has high plasticity that allows us to learn new things or forget what we do not use anymore while being very energy efficient.

This plasticity and energy efficiency are present also in memristors. They can change their state as electricity passes through them. This enables us to explore how the human brain works from a new perspective: building one. Most likely we will not be able to build a perfect replica of the human brain. We do not really need to. But what we will be able to do is learn how our brain computes, teaching us how to create more powerful and energy-efficient processing units. Just as we created our own flying devices by watching birds, so we will create new computers, by learning from the brain (with our brains).

There are plenty of companies that are already pushing toward this era of brain-like computers. Big companies like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, etc., and start-ups such as Knowm, Innatera, and Koniku work towards this vision.

CyberSwarm works on building a processing unit that uses the properties of memristors firstly in cybersecurity, to ensure that all devices, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are well protected from any danger. The long-term vision is to build ultra-low power edge processing units, focused on edge computing and edge artificial intelligence. The vision is of a world populated by swarms of helpful and secure devices, that will improve our lives without endangering our privacy and security. Each of them has a little processing brain, made from silicon.

Conclusion

To create a better future, we need to imagine not only what technology will do for us. We need to look forward and see how it may endanger us also. Why would anyone want new technology, if that technology can be turned against them?

Cybersecurity seems to be left behind in this technological race, especially regarding artificial intelligence, while it is maybe the most critical aspect of any connected device, whatever its function may be. The future needs new and innovative security technologies to keep up with the ever-increasing number of connected devices, which will soon also turn into smart devices. That will enable technology to improve our lives and keep us safe.