Embedded Toolbox: The Ins and Outs of IP Protection for Embedded Systems

November 10, 2020

Video

According to analysts, IP theft costs industry a staggering $500 to $600 billion per year. With more than half a trillion dollars at stake, you’d think that IP protection would be top of mind for many electronic device manufacturers.

However, it appears that it is not. Every year, surveys and polls reveal that embedded and IoT engineers are struggling to take advantage of technologies that could dramatically improve the security posture of their systems. The reasons cited include technical complexity, short time to market windows, and increased cost.

The lowest common denominator of these pitfalls is that security engineering is typically approached as a separate, isolated development practice from normal product development workflows. This means that engineers must go back and review what they’ve already created to ensure that it has been designed securely, which requires time and a high degree of security expertise if done properly.

However, another option is to configure the original development workflow in such a way that security engineering is integrated into day-to-day coding and design practices. This could, in theory, abstract away the complexity, time, and additional cost of an additional security engineering track without asking developers to change the way they work.

As it turns out, this isn’t just theory anymore. It’s being done in practice with tools like IAR C-Trust, an add on the the popular IAR Embedded Workbench Integrated Development Environment (IDE). C-Trust allows developers to implement security context profiles at the beginning of application development that abstract away the complexities of modern, advanced security engineering but still apply those robust security measures within the native development environment.

In this episode of Embedded Toolbox, Shawn Prestridge, Global Field Applications Engineering Manager at IAR Systems, demonstrates how you can configure C-Trust in a matter of minutes to protect your application IP.

Tune in to learn how.