April 18
28
S
ensors
Intellectual Property protection
for sensors in the IIoT
By Michael Gaudlitz,
Gemalto
The IoT brings increasing
intelligence to sensors. While the
computing footprint for this is limited,
the use of such integrated intelligence
must be protected by licensing. With
Sentinel Fit, Gemalto has developed
the smallest licensing solution,
which can be integrated into
virtually any microcontroller.
Most of the billions of IoT devices are smart
sensors and actuators. They send data on fer-
tilizer and moisture levels to vineyard owners,
sometimes for each vine; they tell the driver
where to find the nearest free parking spot; they
turn off street lights when the moon is bright
or there isn’t anybody around; or they are inte-
grated into all kinds of devices, machines and
installations to provide status information
to operator clouds. This invariably requires a
certain device intelligence, not just for analyz-
ing and processing the captured data but also
for transferring it via different – sometimes
encrypted – communication standards.
Let’s take brightness sensors as an example.
They measure brightness via photocells and
convert the data into digital signals. If this
data is analyzed directly in the smart sensor
and parameters it can be defined, a basic level
of intelligence is already implemented. If the
sensor is able to send this data to IoT gate-
ways via wireless interfaces, it is even smarter
because this requires packaging the data for
transmission and handling the entire com-
munication. If the smart sensor is also capa-
ble of receiving data from other sensors – for
instance, to add up measurements from three
different sensors before transmitting them –
it is even more intelligent. And if it then also
features an integrated actuator that turns
the lights on or off, the intelligence of the
decentralized sensor-actuator node contains
enough lines of code to call for Intellectual
Property (IP) protection. The same applies,
of course, to analog communication modules
that link less intelligent sensors and actuators
in a modular manner.
Such protection is absolutely essential,
because the more IP a smart sensor contains,
the more interest from hackers and cyber
criminals in gaining access to the device IP.
They may steal the code to make their own
pirated copies or for sabotage attacks. If an
elevator gets stuck or the heating stays cold,
as happened in November 2016 in Finland,
this may be comparatively trivial. Yet even
such manipulation of smart building elec-
tronics needs to be prevented effectively. The
protection of IP through licensing is not just
a security measure. It also opens up all kinds
of opportunities from flexible license man-
agement. For example, vendors can develop
platform strategies using standardized hard-
ware and provide individual product vari-
ants based solely on software configurations.
This allows them to achieve greater econ-
omies of scale that offer scope for defining
new price and profit targets. Other options
available to vendors include timed, pay-per-
use and function-based licensing models. A
flexible licensing policy for IoT sensors and
actuators can enable entirely new business
models. Take, for example, the brightness
sensor that is used in the home to control the
sun blinds depending on the time of day and
the angle of the sun light. The logic required
is quite different from that of a street light
sensor designed to dim the lights when the
moon shines in order to save electricity. Both
are smart sensors but require a different
algorithm to achieve the application-spe-
cific functionality. For sensor manufacturers,
this can lead to completely new sales sce-
narios, since the sensor manufacturer offer
is no longer differentiated just by the phys-
ical capabilities of the sensor, but also by the
integrated logic that the manufacturer of the
street light or blind logic now buys as part
of the package. All the latter has to worry
about is installing an app in the cloud, on
the tablet or the smartphone with which to
manage the smart devices. Smart sensors will
therefore also change the way in which sup-
pliers work together in the electronics seg-
ment. Since the software is the key player in
this, it needs protecting as well as licensing.
Interestingly, the same licensing tools that
are used by software vendors in the commer-
cial sector can also be used here. At least, if
they were designed to be completely inde-
pendent of the used operating system and
processor or microcontroller. Gemalto has
developed such a solution with Sentinel Fit,
which is also the smallest licensing system
Figure 1. Microcontroller-based
IoT nodes with one or more sen-
sors/actuators contain valuable
code that deserves IP protection
and should also be monetized
through licensing solutions.
