SAN FRANCISCO, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Data security is a top priority that needs to be addressed right from the beginning, from the designing stage itself, a security expert at Google said Friday.
Gerhard Eschelbeck, vice president of security and privacy engineering at the technology company, was speaking at a panel discussion at the 2018 Global Smart City Summit (G50) which kicked off at Silicon Valley, California, on Friday.
"A lot of those devices are manufactured in a very confined environment, with very limited computing powers, small process, small memory, and very often security is not the first priority (in) designing," said Eschelbeck, who has been working in the computer and internet security field for 35 years.
He said data security and privacy of consumers are a top concern. They need to be well protected in an environment where virtually everything can be connected online and exchange data to form the network that is the Internet of Things (IoT).
"Putting the computing environment the right way ... means designing security from the beginning into those systems," he stressed.
He said home devices should be protected with means such as encryption, authentication and software updating.
Eschelbeck said we have a very unique opportunity now. "(The) computing world is changing rapidly from a very traditional end-point model, where you have desktop computers and servers. A lot of these things are changing to this IoT world," he said.
Government regulators and industry experts should help define some minimum criteria for IoT devices, including how to build them in a secure way, he said.
Eschelbeck added that consumers should configure their endpoint devices to get automatically updated, so as to avoid the devices quickly becoming outdated.
Mayors of major cities, urban regulators, private industries and academic institutions around the world are attending the G-50 Summit to discuss how to use smart city technologies.
The three-day event seeks to introduce low-carbon industrial innovations to produce a smart service chain for the smart city industry and boost innovation in urban development.
