Cyber-security in the Wireless Industrial use cases (CyberWI)

Purpose and goal

The Swedish part of the CyberWI project had as a goal to drive the standardization of security mechanisms for the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to increase the usability of such technologies and lower the threshold for smaller companies wishing to use IoT in a secure way. We estimate that we fulfilled these goal or will fulfill them in the near future, when our security standards will be published as IETF RFCs.

Expected results and effects

RISE and Ericsson have had a large influence on the ongoing standardization of security mechanisms for constrained environments at the IETF. We are co-authors of a large number of standards proposals which are currently being evaluated in that domain. We have thus been able to take into account specific needs of the Swedish IT industry in that domain, especially needs formulated by project partners. As a result of our work in the project the resulting security standards will reduce the risks for companies that wish to offer or use services or products related to IoT.

Planned approach and implementation

The work at the IETF was very successful, but it was also subject to significant delays that we couldn´t prevent. A certain extend of delays is not unusual in standardization, but in our case the larger than usual delay was partially due to the fact that the IoT domain is so new that a lot of supporting work was missing and had to be performed in order to advance our more advanced proposals. In parallel we supported our work through reference implementations, which lead to a lot of positive attention and helped to spread the use of our proposals.