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Three areas often create difficulty for IoT engineering teams: Secure hardware platforms. Many vendor offerings using different approaches to secure hardware platforms are available, including secure elements, secure enclaves, and secured microcontrollers. "There are so many implementations," Kim notes. "A security-conscious engineer will find that some of those architectures have obscure published attacks against them, which adds to the confusion." The result is that in the interests of time and cost, engineers arbitrarily choose a default implementation or design around the problem by deciding not to store data locally on the device. Sometimes, they develop their own encryption implementation, which invariably does not go well. It's not uncommon in those cases for someone to leave a critical private key that someone else eventually discovers and uses to unlock all the data on everyone's devices. Embedded operating system. Kim says, "You can use many different operating systems on embedded platforms. There's a lot of complexity with those systems, and there's not much in the way of common design patterns." Some embedded operating systems have developer tools that lack functions to help engineers assess code and make good design decisions, which is especially challenging when those engineers work in the constrained memory and compute environments typical of embedded systems. Firmware upgrades. The challenge here is how engineers manage the deployment of firmware upgrades in a secure fashion at scale for IoT products that sell in volume. "It's so easy to brick a device if you don't upgrade it correctly," Kim says. "Then, you have this device out in the field. You either have to roll a truck or have the customer send it back to you. Either way, it can be extremely expensive." 6 " Hardware vendors recognize that security and the ability to encrypt data on devices are becoming more important."

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