Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your primary go-to-market strategy is an OEM strategy?

Coby Sella: Yes. Our goal is to deploy as many clients as possible. Our footprint in the industry today is about a quarter of a billion devices using Sansa technology, whether it is Sansa providing platform security capabilities or Sansa delivering embedded software within the trusted environment. We already have a very nice base on which we deploy our clients. The clients are free of charge. Our goal is to generate the service. Also, we are very happy to license the service across a very modest business model. We are being compensated based on the amount of assets injected. Our goal is to deploy as many clients as possible.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see interesting open problems given that this is still early. Even though you have half a billion devices, it’s still very early in the IoT space. There must be a lot of open problems that are on your radar. Can you talk about some of them?

Coby Sella: I’d name two problems. One of them is that service providers will have to pull content and modify an IoT device. Before one can achieve these capabilities, the siloing issue will remain a significant problem. That’s one thing that the industry must address.

The second one, which is a bit more distant and I’m not sure if it’s already addressed, is the notion of something that is equivalent to a current Internet certificate authority. Certificate authority today within the Internet ecosystem gives you an indication that a certain website is indeed the website that it claims to be. In a way, there needs to be a similar ecosystem that would dynamically indicate what is the trust level one can have in the context of an IoT device. It should include some indications about the basics of that device and how secure it was to begin with. It should mesh into the situation of the device. Ideally, we’d also include some statistics from the industry trends and the databases that explain what platforms are already hacked.

All of this should be and can be combined to create some level of health indication that can be used by either services that are approaching this device or by peer devices. At the end of the day, hacking is already becoming a reality. It’s not a question of whether devices will be hacked. The question is how can you dynamically adapt to a situation where, in any given time, some of these devices will be hacked. Therefore, you need to treat them with caution and limit your exposure to them and wait for them to update and become healthy again. At which time, you can continue to rely on all of their information and treat them as healthy. I think this is an infrastructure that is lacking and without it, it’s going to be a challenge to create a long-term business model.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security
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