Icon Labs: Building the Internet of Secure Things

The IoT has grown tremendously as an industry in a very short span of time. But still, it faces many complications with its security. In this regard, presently the biggest challenges are scalability on two different levels. First, the capability of Identity & Access Management solutions and Security Management solutions, to support the billions of devices that will be deployed as part of the IoT. Second, the design of endpoint security solutions to scale down into the smallest IoT endpoint devices. To deal with these and other similar complications, security providers like Icon Labs have emerged.
Icon Labs provides endpoint security and identity management solutions to enable OEMs to add security quickly and easily to their IoT connected devices and machines. These solutions include IoT Identity and Access Management, data protection for IoT devices, and intrusion detection and protection for IoT devices.
Icon Labs has been renowned as a promising alliance because they believe that, “For the IoT to successfully move from proof-of-concept projects to commercial deployments, security must be addressed throughout the system.”
A Company providing Security Building Blocks
Icon Labs is a privately held corporation headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa. They have been providing solutions for embedded OEMs since 1992 with more than 100 customers worldwide.
Icon Labs is focused on creating the Internet of Secure Things. They provide software toolkits and security solutions to enable embedded OEMs and IoT device manufacturers to build security into their device. The team at Icon Labs is uniquely focused on resource-limited IoT devices – devices that cannot run large, sophisticated security solutions requiring operating systems like Windows, Linux, IoS, etc.
Their solutions support all major embedded OSes and RTOSes with security modules designed specifically for use in limited resource environments characteristic of the embedded marketspace. These solutions provide security building blocks for protecting the device itself rather than just relying on security at the perimeter.
Pioneer of Icon Labs
Alan Grau is the President and Co-founder of Icon Labs and the architect of Icon Labs’ award-winning Floodgate firewall. Alan has an MS in computer science from Northwestern University. With his 25 years of embedded software experience, Alan has been leading Icon Labs to the pinnacle since its inception. Prior to founding Icon Labs, he worked for AT&T Bell Labs and Motorola.
Fulfilling Unique Requirements of the IoT
Icon Labs is focused on building security solutions specifically for the IoT. Rather than customizing enterprise and desktop security solutions according to new needs, Icon Labs builds solutions specifically to meet the unique requirements of the IoT.
Icon Labs builds embedded products to solve unique problems, and as such, often require custom solutions. Even though their products provide the foundational security capabilities, many OEMs need more – they need to integrate with custom security management systems, detect and block unique threats, or make other extensions to the base products to meet the unique security requirements of their products.
In these situations, Icon Labs’ engineering team implements the product extensions and integrates with the embedded applications, shaving months off their schedule and significantly reducing development cost. Furthermore, these service groups enable their customers to leverage the experience and knowledge of their engineering team.
Recent Innovations
Icon Labs is rolling out its IoT Identity and Access Management solutions that adds to their industry leading security solutions. These new capabilities include the Floodgate Certificate Authority and Floodgate PKI Client. The CA provides complete certificate management for companies choosing to implement their own certificate-based authentication using public key infrastructure. It provides industrial OEMs the ability to securely inject keys into their manufactured devices before they leave the factory and to operate as a private certificate authority, enabling secure certificate distribution and management for the millions of industrial and IoT devices currently being developed.
The Floodgate PKI Client enables IoT devices to generate keys, create certificate signing requests, and retrieve signed certificates from the CA. The client supports SCEP, EST, and OCSP and supports all RTOSes, embedded Linux, and Windows platforms.
Icon Labs as a Promising Alliance
As projects move from proof-of-concept to deployments at scale, companies are beginning to address security requirements, particularly device identity and authentication. Icon Labs has extended their end-point security solution by adding Identity and Access Management capability for IoT devices.
Furthermore, the team at Icon Labs consists of security experts who help assess the security posture of the current devices or the design for the next generation system. This team can review the customer’s existing product implementation or design against industry standard security practices and help develop a plan to ensure the security of the device.
Taking pride in their work and the success they have achieved through providing world class services, Alan asserts, “We have been building intelligent, secure, networked devices for industry leaders in the Industrial Control, Critical Infrastructure, Military/Aerospace, Telecommunications, Networking and Medical Equipment industries for over 20 years. Our solutions are at work every day, from the factory floor to broadband Internet access devices, from core network routers to smart modems, and from optical cross-connects to the operating room.”

Source :- The 20 Fastest Growing IoT Companies