Cybercrime is on the rise. As many as 73 percent of industrial companies have suffered a security incident resulting in the loss of sensitive data, according to Siemens, and those breaches are projected to be costly. A report from Cybersecurity Ventures pegs the total collective damages at $6 trillion by 2021.
An outsized number of vulnerable devices fall squarely into the internet of things (IoT) category, which is Mocana’s specialty — since 2004, it has developed and maintained an end-to-end, on-device cybersecurity suite tailor-made for a range of systems, like in-flight entertainment consoles, medical devices, and cell phone carrier networks. To fuel growth, Mocana today announced it has raised $15 million in new funding from Sway Ventures, with existing investors Shasta Ventures and ForgePoint Capital participating. This comes after the San Francisco-based startup’s $11 million series F in May 2017 and brings its total venture capital raised to $105 million.
Mocana CEO William Diotte said the fresh cash will be used to add new technical capabilities (such as visibility and analytics tools) to the company’s products and to expand its sales, marketing, and customer support teams. He said the funds will also drive “further [expansion]” across Mocana’s 200-company-strong client base of defense, manufacturing, and IoT companies, which includes industry titans like Samsung, Verizon, Xerox, Emerson, Schneider Electric, ABB, Emerson, HP, General Dynamics, GE, Panasonic, AT&T, Bosch, and Siemens.
“With existing IT network and operational technology security measures failing to keep the hackers at bay, there has never been a more critical time to rethink security and start protecting devices from the inside out,” Diotte added. “Developers creating applications and services for the IoT can no longer afford to bolt on security as an afterthought; trust must be embedded at the beginning of device and application life cycles … Our customers require simple and secure solutions that allow them to protect both legacy devices and new devices.”
Mocana’s cryptographic controls target IoT systems not only in the development and manufacturing stages, but throughout activation, updates, and management. Its TrustPoint product features a full-stack architecture compiled into C++, Java, or Python, with a cryptographic engine optimized for resource-constrained devices containing as little as 64KB of RAM and less than 30KB of storage.
In addition to spotlight features like credentialing and encryption, Mocana’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offers verified boot and updates via an automated certificates pipeline, on-device firewalls, and zero-touch device enrollment leveraging the IETF’s Enrollment over Secure Transport (EST) standard. Moreover, it enables apps to call cryptographic functions through a set of APIs and makes available a “military-grade” cryptographic library using an OpenSSL-compatible interface.
“Mocana is driving a fundamentally different approach to securing IoT from the device to the cloud,” said Shasta Ventures’ Rob Coneybeer. “We continue to invest in Mocana because we firmly believe that … device security management platform is a game-changing technology for the future of IoT and industrial control system security.”
Mocana says its solutions integrate with more than 70 chipsets and 30 real-time operating systems from the likes of Arm, Dell, Qualcomm, Intel, and Microsoft. The company also claims its products are currently protecting over 100 million IoT and industrial devices.
Source: VentureBeat
