A Carnegie Mellon University team from the Silicon Valley campus, a Cornell Tech and Rice University Team from New York City, New York and Houston, TX, an Excalibur Group team from Poprad, Slovakia, and innovators from Aircloak and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern, Germany, were recently declared the winners of the Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) Security Grand Challenge. These solution providers each received US $75,000 in addition to exhibition space at the IoT World Forum, according to NineSigma, Inc., an innovation partner to global organisations, which announced the selection of the winners.
A Grand Challenge involves reaching across the globe for solutions that address complex problems, such as preventing epidemics of infectious diseases or combating global warming. NineSigma managed all aspects of the Cisco Grand Challenge, and its Online platform, NineSights, was the focal point for the program.
The Cisco Grand Challenge was an initiative to help secure the Internet of Things (IoT) — the smart, Internet-enabled devices changing everything including the way we heat our homes or run our manufacturing facilities. NineSigma attracted more than 100 high-quality proposals from 33 countries on behalf of Cisco.
“The four winning solutions from this challenge represent some of the most innovative approaches to enable people and organizations to benefit from the IoT. As more organisations adopt new business models related to the IoT, these solutions demonstrate strong potential in enabling organizations to protect IoT interactions before, during and after an attack,” said Martin Roesch, Vice-president and chief architect, Cisco Security Business Group.
The winning proposals of the Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge include:
- Excalibur Group, which is creating an overarching identity framework for the IoT based on graph theory, local block chain and context awareness. The solution utilises the mobile phone or a wearable computer to act as a universal security token.
- Cornell Tech and Rice University, working together to create physical proof-of-presence protocols for transient connections in the IoT and operating in backwards-compatible mode with legacy standards.
- The Carnegie Mellon University team, which is creating a solution to control IoT privacy risks and trade-offs with Fog Mediation.
- Aircloak and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, which is developing a technology and service that provides highly accurate aggregate analytics over use data while strongly protecting user privacy.
Image Credit: Cisco
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