IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 139

IS SECURITY FREE?
If failure to secure a system is a defect,
security-hardening the system is a quality
initiative. If security is quality, and quality
is free, then security is free, right?
Well, almost. Effectively addressing
this challenge will require industry efforts
similar in scale to the quality efforts of
the 1980s and 1990s. This is Quality 2.0:
Security, the sequel, the next level. It is
the security hardening of our products. It
is happening now in some companies.
For others, here are some steps to consider. These steps follow the same general
pattern as Quality 1.0, our industry's conversion to effective quality practices in
the 1980s and 1990s.
Like Quality 1.0, Quality 2.0 starts
with a high-level commitment to security. Ideally, a C-level executive needs
makes security a priority across the
board. It is important to engage the culture of the whole organization, because
crackers infiltrate from any available
point in an organization. The effort itself
may be delegated to a lower level, but
there must be commitment and support
at or near the top.

The Art of Storage

Also like Quality 1.0, this effort will
be effective with dedicated resources.
While security will have to be part of
everyone's job, a team primarily responsible for product security will obviously be
most effective.

Every day there is another
story of cracked devices,
cracked web apps to
control devices, and
cracked smartphones
controlling devices.
Finally, this effort is not just about
designers using encryption. The crackers have too many tools and tricks to
get in and in every part of the delivered product from the engineering
details of the embedded device, to
online support tools (imagine crackers
modifying your downloadable firmware images) to cloud application programming interfaces. Success will

require an upgrade to the product lifecycle-like Quality 1.0.
A great place to start is the Building
Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM;
https://www.bsimm.com/). This program is ostensibly a study of real-world
software security initiatives. For those
just getting started in this area, their
templates and checklists are a good
place to see where to focus efforts. The
material is available under a Creative
Commons license and can be used to
survey internal practices. Ideally, these
internal results can be contributed to the
BSIMM data set to help improve the
understanding of industry security practices. However, the results are also useful to see where one's company stands
relative to other companies, and to identify what to work on first.
Whether BSIMM or another method
is chosen, effective security will require
a full-court-press similar to Quality 1.0.
Expect to hear more about BSIMM and
about companies effecting real change
in the coming months.

(continued from page 131)

FIGURE 7. The Kingston Wi-Fi flash card
reader.

Figure 6 shows the Seagate Wireless
and Wireless Plus mobile HDDs with a
USB 3.0 interface as well as Wi-Fi connectivity. The Wireless Plus has storage capacity up to 2 TB, and the device
can support up to eight separate mobile
devices over Wi-Fi. The battery can

stream over 10 h of movies on one battery charge.
Kingston makes a Wi-Fi flash card
reader (Figure 7) that supports USB
and SD card input and has dimensions
of 124.8 mm × 59.9 mm × 17.3 mm
with a weight of 98 g. In addition to
allowing Wi-Fi access from SD cards,
it also can recharge a mobile phone.
External storage is a key means to
add additional digital storage capacity
to laptop and tablet computers as well as
smartphones. The move to SSDs in laptops with limited storage capacity creates
a need by many users to add external
storage devices to carry content that cannot fit on the internal SSD. These external storage devices may use USB 3.0,
Thunderbolt 2.0, or Wi-Fi connectivity to

move data around, and they may contain HDDs or even solid-state storage.
The storage needs of many consumers
continue to grow, and they will need
supplemental storage if their main storage is not great enough.

REFERENCES
[1] (2015, June 11). DRAMeXchange Projection of Market Penetration of Notebook SSDs
from 2014 to 2017, Storage Newsletter.
[Online]. Available: http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/market-reportsresearch/
ssds-exceeding-30-market-penetration-in-notebooks-this-year-dramexchange/
[2] (2015, July 1). Nextag price search.
[Online]. Available: nextag.com
[3] Coughlin Associates Data, Digital Storage
Technology Newsletter, Coughlin Associates,
June 2015.

october 2015

IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

139

https://www.bsimm.com/ http://www.storagenews http://www.letter.com/rubriques/market-reportsresearch/ http://www.nextag.com

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