It seems everything is going smart these days: refrigerators, entire factories, shoes, this ball thing that spies on your pets. But you know what else is getting pretty smart? Hackers, especially since this burgeoning IoT boom – which Gartner estimates will reach 20.4 billion connected devices by 2020 – is all-too-often setting people up to have their networks hijacked much in the same way babies lose candy to morally bankrupt people. (Monsters.) Indeed, as this piece from CNET points out, “There's a running joke regarding connected gadgets and the internet of things: ‘The 'S' in IoT stands for security.’”
But companies like Telit are trying to make room for that ‘S.’ Recently unveiled to the world, their WL865E4-P module, a low-power Wi-Fi Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) combo unit based on the Qualcomm QCA4020 system-on-chip (SoC), features integrated crypto hardware, enabling “IoT developers to meet demanding requirements for power consumption, security, performance, size, and reliability,” the company explained in a press release. Designed for high-bandwidth applications, the module is ideal for uses in “health care, video, smart home, and industrial control.”