Securing Devices and Data, Dispersive Brings Programmable Networking to IoT, IIoT and Blockchain
Last week at the IoT Evolution Expo, Rick Conklin, CTO, Dispersive Networks, weighed in on the potential of programmable networking to enhance the security and efficiency of IoT and Industrial IoT implementations, including those leveraging blockchain.
Conklin spoke at the first annual blockchain education and certification event, along with other tech leaders, focusing his talk on what blockchain can bring to network operations and optimization, while also sharing how the next generation of networks that are spun-up to operate over the public Internet create a better fit for distributed blockchain systems.
He shared cases for blockchain in smart city & smart region deployments including the smart grid and microgrids, an area where Dispersive has been innovating and implementing for several years and whose customers include grid operators and participants in different ISO regions in the United States.
We caught up with Conklin after the event, to learn more about his vision for future networking and what makes Dispersive a “disruptive force” as the technology challenges status quo, legacy connectivity technologies.
“I was attracted to join Dispersive several years ago, after working on a project with them and learning about how differently their software defined networking platform works, compared to traditional IP networks,” Conklin said. “Legacy protocols find a single path through the network, then stay on that single path even if there are errors, congestion or degraded conditions, or even the presence of an adversary. There’s a better way to provision, manage and secure networks, and Dispersive proved this in trials and implementations for some of the most demanding organizations in the world.”
Conklin explained that network security, performance, ease of deployment, high availability and massive scalability are not optimized when legacy protocols, which are not mesh-aware, are used. “Typically, with VPNs, there are trade-offs and performance problems. For example, if you have a VPN concentrator at a site, you have a vulnerability – this is a known point where enemies will attack. As far as deployment concerns, VPNs don’t automatically interop with firewalls, network address tables, and more, and this creates complexity and risk.”
Legacy networks are hard to deploy, Conklin said, citing the example of needing to connect new IPV6 devices to IPV4 servers.
“Our approach provides state of the art security, including software defined perimeters,” he said.
