Integrated IoT Security – Natali Tshuva, Sternum

This is texturung TV. Hey everyone, welcome here to another text drunk TV interview, you know a week or two ago. I was down in out in Tel Aviv at a conference called yala devops and I I moderated a great panel there around iot the edge security and you kind of what's coming down the pike.

We were I had a great panel. One of the people on my panel was the tally shuva the top Suva Natalie is the CEO of a company called sternum, and I was able to catch up with Natalie today over in Israel and to talk to her because the company announced some major news today that we want to talk about, but Natalie, thank you for joining us on Deck strong TV. And Android here and thanks for having me.

Yeah, my pleasure. So. You know, I I tried to kind of set the table, but I didn't tell people your background and the sternum story.

So before we get today's news, let's just take a quick moment and and give people a little bit of your background and your co-founder CEO external a little bit of about the company. Yeah, of course. So about myself really in a nutshell grew up in engineering.

So I started at 14 we found a graduated green computer science and that pretty much set the stage for joining unit 8200 the Israeli NSA basically a lot of cybersecurity mission critical development and embedded development of involved then many years in Israeli industry actually in the offensive side finding zero, they want abilities understanding exploitation understanding better devices. And then I finished my masters in computer science The Dilemma was between going into medical school or start something that will influence interest in Industries. Like the medical industry.

So for me, it was a bit too late to become a doctor even though I still dream about it at night. But what we are doing in sternum is with belt and infrastructure for securing and observing embedded devices or what we call iot devices. and we're very excited about that because it means that you can secure your pacemakers your instrument pumps your plc's your industrial control systems in a way that the up until now was pretty much saved for cloud and endpoints and not for the iot space and this is what Yeah.

Well, let me just say that the medical the doctors profession their losses is the iot and Edge and security industries gain, right, but I mean, it's a dilemma every, you know, every parent do I want my child to be a doctor or do I want him to change the world in technology anyway? How long has sternum been around now? Three and a half years now bells are technology though in the garage for quite some time.

And in the past year, this is really where we went to Market and we're already working with major companies securing very interesting devices. I got it. All right, and again, you know, we we did this panel at yalla.

Really kind of the next Frontier now that we're seeing. is this you know, we talked about internet of things for a long time, but it's really taken off and I think the kinds of things that are empowering it is the move to Edge Computing where so not everything is necessarily going all the way back to the cloud and and again as I as I mentioned that the panel is the whole idea of 5G networking, which is giving much Better bandwidth, you know bigger deeper bandwidth faster bandwidth and then it'll Empower that edge and iot devices as well. Well before we get in today's news one other thing Natali when I look at the world of iot, there's what I call industrial stuff industrial iot medical devices that you spoke about things like connected pacemakers or or insulin pumps or IV in the hospital right that a Hospital's loaded with with connected devices everything from the mri's and those pumps to the heart monitors and everything else that you know makes a modern hospital work and then you know, and then there's industrial iot devices sensors in manufacturing facilities and all that.

Then there's a whole nother category. the connected house Right, my house has 40 IPS in it. I don't even know what I'm doing with 40 IPS in my house, but you know, but those devices are connected as well.

Where do you think the is all of that? Stirring them sort of Market or is there a particular is it industrial versus consumer or what do you what do you guys go aiming for? Yeah.

Will give you two answers. One of them is the engine. Answer and one of them is the business answer from the engineering perspective.

This is one what you just said is one of the biggest problems in reality industry the diversity the different implications the different operating systems the different communication protocols. It's not just windows or Linux anymore. Right?

We have and different applications different companies building those devices. But the Western design the solution is about taking these Diversified operating systems or what we call the broken infrastructure because we are building this connected future on embedded systems that are pretty much Legacy systems real-time operating systems embedded, you know, they don't have any advanced capability Foreman engineering perspectives terms suits all of that and connected home industrial control systems and medical devices. They're all working on this.

Name operating systems and these same kind of infrastructure and we integrate with that. So from an engineering perspective everything you just mentioned is understandable support. From a business perspective though.

I think there are different implications to a medical device being compromised and it connected home device and it means different requirements different language and different risk so far and from that perspective sternum main focus is Mission critical sectors, like critical interest structures industria manufacturing and medical we're connected home is less of a focus for us. But any home manufacturer company can still enjoy our solution Got it. All right.

We got all that out of the way. Let's get to the news now seven minutes later, but you guys announced some big news today and why not? Why didn't you share with our audience?

Yeah, so I'm very excited about that because I've been talking to customers for three years now and one of the things I keep hearing is on device security doesn't work. It caused a lot of performance issues. It's all talking to great.

I don't have the souls code. I can't do anything about that and I don't believe you that it's going to actually walk. I don't even I I'm not even talking about the security and we realize and the reasons a big trust issue in the industry companies like Schneider Electric Seamans, they take very seriously the safety and yeah ability of the product and implementing endpoint protection.

It's not like installing cult strike on your Windows device. That being said you still need and point protection on those devices. So what we are allowed to do today Ellen is what we call trust that go and what we mean by that is We want people to actually have easy access to install our product to experiment with our product.

We evaluate our product to see the overhead to see the performance to see how what kind of security incidents it can prevent in a very transparent way. So what we did is actually we are launching today a free version of our solution open to all to install in a single click installation inside the platform Ellen you can see exactly what vulnerabilities are prevented. You.

Have a nice. View of all the CW is the common weakness enumeration by my trip that is protected by sternum. You can see what is detected.

What is prevented what kind of events we are collecting it's only one way communication. So the the cloud does not speak with the devices only the devices speaks with a cloud there is prevention on device and the key element is that you get all of the features that we have in terms of prevention free to install on your Linux system in a single click and I think you know, there are big companies that can go through the process of POC the process so evaluation the legal and then testing but there are companies that can't really do that and they don't have any solution out there today to help with designing Security in your products. Um, and we are actually trying to solve that issue and give free access to anyone wants to start evaluating and designing security into this products.

Good fantastic. That's really really great just to put it in perspective for our audience. You know, one of the one of the challenges around iot management and iot security is you you don't have a Windows computer with a half a terabyte of hard drive and gigabits of RAM and everything else many iot devices are very limited headspace.

Right? And and so you wind up, you know, there's a lot of headless micro kernel, you know type of setups what percentage of the iot Kind of Base. Do you think runs Linux Natalie?

So I think it's around 60% so majority Ellen. Yeah, I have to say Ellen that our platform supports real-time operating system plays Zephyr free althos micrion medical devices are usually running on real-time operating systems. We have a deployment on VX walks a PLC so our platform actually support this this side of the industry as well.

Currently we are opening the free license just for Lenox. It is 60% but still you have to be very likely and our solution being able to walk from real-time operating systems means that even folino's it's less than three percent overhead almost no memory use it but you know what words doesn't mean a lot when you can actually try it out and tested yourself and see the overhead and what we're trying to do. Absolutely.

You mentioned it is free. Are there any sort of limits on that how many devices or you know, is there any limits that people should be aware of? Yeah, it is missing some of our Advanced features like customizable and normally detection engine full-blown observability collection of software events.

I get to find memories identifying my functioning in the field enabling customer to put their own logs and match rates. These are missing what you're getting is treat advice for free with all of the prevention algorithms implemented like command injection prevention memory Integrity use prevention buffer overflows. And really what we are seeing in scale as the top 10.

Oh sap vulnerabilities variety devices is what you're getting for free. If you need to protect more than three devices, this is where you All right. And you know what they say even the worst hamburger to a starving man in the desert.

Is a beautiful thing right? So most people I mean, let's face it a lot of a lot of organizations don't have any protection. Or very very little protection on their iot devices today.

So this is this is this is a great. Benefit a great I mean to anyone it gives you something it also gives you guys upgrade path. two things number one for people who want to use this new free product.

What's the easiest way for them to go do this? Just you know type apps that sternum that cloud and get it running on your device. And you know what Ellen it's even not just for organizations.

If you have your own router and you want to protected against Botanical and gets zoria against all of the latest small world funny on routers. You can just surf the room websites and get started. So you could put it on like Wi-Fi routers as well.

You think? Yeah, definitely. A lot of Home routers today are running open wrt, which is an open source enabling you to enhance the abilities of your homework.

If you don't trust the vendor and sternum can even increase that with an own device prevention with real-time alerts or something bad happens. So you're under your own control and what's happening in your home environment and for home users. This is just free protection because you usually don't have more than three devices.

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's really that's really great. Natalie for people who maybe want to look at exploring some of the other great features that the full-blown.

I don't know if you want to call an Enterprise version, but that the full version has they're not free version. Give us an idea. How is that priced?

So first, I think before pricing they should know it's about two days of integration Max. So they can reach out. It's the fastest light waste installation.

I ever known in the embedded space. So that's one thing in terms of price in Allen like every other SAS platform. It is based on the consumption.

So as you connect more devices to the platform the pricing increase their device Got it. And and this is this is a solution that scales all the way from like you said one to three devices and then the full product is really an Enterprise level. Kind of, you know scalability.

Yes. fantastic millions of devices today connected before devices that we support devices that are operating in nuclear facilities, and we also protect the gateways and home water. So It goes back to my point where the infrastructure is the same.

And it needs to have military grade protection because everyone is a Target today. Unfortunately every asset every device every Network. The great a great fantastic Natalie one last question because I know we mentioned we mentioned where people can go download but to get any background on sternum the website again is sternum St.

ER and um dot cloud. Oh sternum iot. That's it.

Sternum. com. All right.

I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to sit and chat with us. Fantastic news. This is a really great thing for people out there to be able to get this free software in on there on their router on their devices and get some security and protection immediately.

Keep up the great work and come keep us posted things develop over there. Should be happy to thank you so much for hosting me today my pleasure. Good luck with sternum.

Go check it out. com. If you've got I and we all have iot devices today go get some free protection.

It's available now. All right, we're gonna take a break here on techstrong TV. We'll be right back.