Hacking news was quite prevalent in 2015, and as more devices now connect to the Internet, hackers have more avenues to infiltrate our lives. This is the problem that the Internet of Things (IoT) need to address if companies who sell connected devices expect consumers to adopt the IoT trend.

Examples of these serious data and information breaches include: VTech Holdings, Ltd. was hacked and exposed parents’ information and photos of children; enabling Siri on an iPhone’s lockscreen could render a user vulnerable to attacks; feeds from some baby monitors can be accessed by unauthorized people; and some wireless hard drives have a vulnerability that allows it to be an easy target for hackers. These are just some of the problems IoT faced this year, and we can expect the attacks to proliferate as we continue down the connected path.

The benefits of Cognitive Code native Siri-like platform

To address these security issues, Cognitive Code, Inc., which develops and deploys practical conversational artificial intelligence systems, announced the availability and deployment of its SILVIA Secure conversationally intelligent applications. These apps can reside natively in connected devices, such as smartphones, tablets, televisions, cars, toys and critical infrastructure that connects to the Internet.

Cognitive Code specializes a technology similar to Siri, but instead of relying on the cloud, the conversationally intelligent apps can reside natively on mobile or other connected devices.

“Cognitive Code’s SILVIA Platform was designed from the ground up to run securely and natively on mobile and embedded devices,” said Leslie Spring, CEO and founder of Cognitive Code. “While the rest of the industry will be scrambling for a long time to deal with the legislative and public fallout of these server-based security breaches, we have a secure and portable solution today, not two years from now.  Those two years can be the difference between your company disrupting the market or your company being disrupted by hackers and litigation.”

The SILVIA technology can be deployed in compact and secure environment, and it includes native unconnected operations on mobile devices and embedded systems. It is a voice solution that offers interactions that understand queries without relying on scripted and structured language dialog, but it also allows customization so users can have a unique conversational experience.

Protecting personal data on mobile devices

Cognitive Code explained that SILVIA does not depend on data stored in remote server farms or even an Internet connection for transactions to go through, as its artificial intelligent algorithms encrypts the data stored on the device, thus adding an additional layer of security to personal and private data that resides on the devices. SILVIA’s footprint on a device can be as small as 5 MB, meaning it can reside on virtually any IoT device, including toys.

Cognitive Code isn’t the only one trying to address the security problem of IoT, as Israeli startup Secret Double Octopus, Ltd. has revealed a software that splits up a given file into small portions that are randomly transmitted to the desired destination via different routes. The files would then have to be perfectly reassembled by the recipient in order to view them. This process makes it impossible to intercept the file and compromise it, thus making it an ideal solution for transmitting information between connected devices.

Photo by pixelcreatures (Pixabay)