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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 20 2015, @11:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-cares-what-my-fridge-thinks dept.

The NSA (National Security Agency) is funding development of an architecture for a "safer" Internet of Things (IoT), in the hope of incorporating better security at a product's design phase.

The controversial US intelligence agency is bestowing a $299,000, one-year grant to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) for a project that aims to build a lightweight virtualisation architecture which will make it easier to build security into IoT systems before they leave the factory.

There are some interesting reactions to the announcement on the Sophos Naked Security blog.

Why would the NSA invest in a project that would make it harder for them to spy on you?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday August 20 2015, @12:33PM

    by zocalo (302) on Thursday August 20 2015, @12:33PM (#225361)
    Yes, they are, which is a comment I've made before as well. The quandary they, and similar agencies, seem to be having is that the two roles - securing the nation against hostile powers and gathering intelligence on those hostile powers - often conflict, and when they do they need to choose one or the other - e.g. securing software vs. backdooring it. So far, pretty much without exception, all the evidence (Snowden, et all) seems to be that they default to the latter, and it's going to take a major effort to change that mindset after so long - and it didn't start with 9/11 either - the Clipper chip was 1993, and was probably being knocked around as a concept some time before that. Short of a major incident being proven to have utilised either an exploit they sat on or deliberately placed though, that's a bull I doubt any politician is going to be willing to grasp by the horns.
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    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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