Call for IoT Trainings: Secure Development for embedded Devices

The world is much easier to handle without limits. If you have all your frameworks freely available and have the luxury of running your code with a multi-MB (or -GB) runtime environment, then you are in paradise. The world of embedded devices and the Internet of Things looks different. Saving energy is the prime directive. The power supply might be a battery or the connector pin of another device. Multiple cores are rare, memory is even rarer. If you are acquainted with the container and cloud lifestyle, then embedded systems will be a culture shock. Think kilo instead of mega or giga. Small devices run code, too. So this is where security comes into play. What can you do to design your embedded code to be small and secure?

Secure design and coding have entered the stage of software development in recent years. The art of getting things right and not trusting anything or anyone is hard on platforms where memory, computing power, and storage are plentiful. Saying goodbye to your favourite high-level library or easy deployments involving several megabytes of downloads will transform your development cycle. Instead of including large amounts of code for single function calls, take care of the details yourself. When operating in tight environments developer usually bring their own toolchains and helper libraries in order to save space. Computing is another barrier. Doing expensive cryptography is fine on multi-core processors with excessive memory bandwidth. The same can be challenging on low-core and…