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TechCrunch reports:
At a small press event in San Francisco, Microsoft today announced the launch of a secure end-to-end IoT product that focuses on microcontroller-based devices — the kind of devices that use tiny and relatively low-powered microcontrollers (MCUs) for basic control or connectivity features. Typically, these kinds of devices, which could be anything from a toy to a household gadget or an industrial application, don't often get updated and hence, security often suffers.
At the core of Azure Sphere is a new class of certified MCUs. As Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith stressed in today's announcement, Microsoft will license these new Azure Sphere chips for free, in hopes to jump-start the Azure Sphere ecosystem.
First one's free, kid!
Because it's hard to secure a device you can't update or get telemetry from, it's no surprise that these devices will feature built-in connectivity. And with that connectivity, these devices can also connect to the Azure Sphere Security Service in the cloud.
Now, you probably assume that these devices will run Windows, but you're wrong. For the first time ever, Microsoft is launching a custom Linux kernel and distribution: the Azure Sphere OS. It's an update to the kind of real-time operating systems that today's MCUs often use.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by adun on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:01PM (2 children)
I don't have it at hand right now, but Microsoft did publish an interesting article about an outlier in telemetry data being used to spot malware before it got released and became broadly available. It's a very interesting read, honestly -- my recollections are rather foggy but I think it basically boiled down to spotting a security hole by debugging a crash with nothing but telemetry data about the crash.
Telemetry *does* offer useful, if reactive data in this regard. I'd definitely be happy to share *some* data from my machine (i.e. the kind that's needed for this) if I knew this was all it's used for. Obviously, with the current state of affairs, that's a no thanks, and the claim is just PR, but there's some interesting technical stuff behind it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @05:57PM (1 child)
>> Microsoft did publish an interesting article about an outlier in telemetry data being used to spot malware before it got released and became broadly available.
A related and extremely helpful use is to determine if a newly reported security vulnerability is in use in the wild. As an example, look up CVE-2018-0887 in portal.msrc.microsoft.com. It's flagged as "Exploited: No". That information comes from Telemetry.
The privacy question comes up a lot. Those questions have answers.
http://microsoft.com/privacy [microsoft.com]
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Tuesday April 17 2018, @08:50PM
Yeah, I tried reading that recently. Those answers have questions.