Digital transformation

#TheFutureIsYours Shaping Europe’s digital future

Warning: Automatic translations may not be 100% accurate. Show automatically-translated text

Secure end user devices to protect against malware/ransomware

Gerhard Schwartz 15/02/2022 16:44

15/02/2022 18:01 0 comments

Today, all end user devices are controlled by OSs and software, so they all are susceptible to malicious software and hence insecure. No matter how much effort is put into endpoint security, hacking those end user devices will always be possible. Also, most cyberattacks against IT systems are started via phishing emails compromising some PC first.

We need to reintroduce hardware-controlled end user devices that are not susceptible to malware. Unlike the old terminals used in the past, they should support todays needs such as graphics, multimedia, multiple windows and videoconferencing. This is technically feasible, developing such secure devices will create a good market for European vendors. The EU should define a category for such secure devices, and make those mandatory for critical applications.

This will break many existing dependencies (e.g. on Windows) as these cloud/edge-oriented secure devices will only work with new portal software, preferably in open source. This new architecture will also help to improve data privacy.

IoT, Industry 4.0 and other M2M applications can also be protected against malware by introducing secure hardware-controlled endpoints. Using similar protocols they can be combined with secure end user devices, also for better integration of automatic and human-controlled processes.

The European patent EP 3 566 169 („Asymmetrische System- und Netzwerk-Architektur“) describes secure end user devices, secure endpoints and the associated ecosystem.