ARM CEO Sounds Security Alarm

Article By : Dylan McGrath, EE Times

Simon Segars calls on tech firms to come together to address cyber security, which says threatens the potential of the Internet of Things.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — ARM Technology CEO Simon Segars called on the technology industry to come together to address security in a connected world, an issue he said threatens to undermine the impact of the Internet of Things and its potential for enhancing human capabilities.

“Cybersecurity is a mess if you ask me. Unless we do something, it’s going to get worse,” Segars said in a keynote address at the ARM TechCon here Tuesday (Oct. 25). “When everything has an IP address; when everything is connected; then everything can be hacked,” he added.

In sounding the alarm on security, Segars joins a growing list of tech heavyweights calling for new software and hardware technologies for mitigating the risks posed by hacking and other forms of cyberattacks, which in aggregate cost industry and consumers billions of dollars each year. Security threats loom increasingly larger as the IoT — which already encompasses billions of devices and is expected to expand to include tens of billions more in coming years — continues to take shape.

A number of grassroots IoT security efforts are well underway, including several from ad hoc industry groups and agencies such as agencies such as UL, the former Underwriters Laboratories. ARM itself threw more weight by these efforts this week with the release of its “Security Manifesto” — a white paper that explores the risks posed by cyberattacks and the technology world’s responsibility to address it — and the roll out of an architecture standard and three new products  to help implement it.

Simon Segars, ARM CEO, delivers a keynote address at the ARM TechCon event Wednesday.
Credit: Dylan McGrath/EE Times

ARM has been a champion of security over the years, introducing several years ago its TrustZone secure extension environment. The company upped the ante with the introduction of its Platform Security Architecture (PSA), a set of hardware and software specifications based on an analysis of multiple IoT use cases.

In his 30-minute talk here, Segars outlined the growing opportunity for technology to influence the ways that we live, work and play with trends such as the growing focus on data generation, consumption and analysis on applications such as medical technology and transportation. The importance of improving security is only compounded with the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, he said.

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