HP Innovation Journal Issue 09: Spring 2018 | Page 22

S E C U R IT Y R E S E A R C H
SIMON SHIU
H e a d of S e curit y L a b, H P L a bs
B O R I S BA L AC H E FF
H P Fe llow, C hief Te ch n olo gist fo r S e curit y
Re se a rch a n d I n n ovatio n , H P
If personal devices and 2D printers are the
dominant endpoint devices today, it won’t be
long before they are joined by technologies that
further fuse our physical and digital worlds, like
3D printing, augmented reality, and sensors that
monitor everything from the weather to health
data and traffic patterns. As devices sense,
actuate, collect data from, and work to change
or configure the physical world, the security of
endpoints and their ecosystems will only become
more critical to any organization’s cybersecurity.
And the threat landscape will get worse. Nation
states and criminal organizations with huge
resources are creating increasingly sophisticated
attacks, and the efficiency of the internet and the
underground economy means this sophistication
is very quickly available to a larger set of
attackers with diverse motivations.
It is clearly a case of when—not if—
you will be attacked.
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In the future, cyber events could
compromise millions, or even billions
of cyber-physical devices at once,
whether to manipulate their behav-
ior or even disable them altogether.
And as we consider this in the con-
text of digital manufacturing—where
products are manufactured on the 3D
printer nearest the end customer, in
the context of computing for person-
alized healthcare, or more broadly
in the context of Artificial Intelli-
gence (AI) and machine-learning
being built into devices to support
autonomous behaviors—we believe
that security innovation will be key
to addressing emerging threats and
rising to the challenge of assuring the
safety of our cyber-physical future.
This is why, at HP, we are
investing in long-term research in
cybersecurity. We are pursuing, for
example, the security innovations
needed to allow 3D printing technol-
ogy to revolutionize manufacturing.
These range from cybersecurity
research for our 3D printers them-
selves, to researching the design of
secure workflow capabilities that
ensure key security properties are
retained in digital designs until they
become physically printed objects.
This will be key to ensuring that the
physical and mechanical properties
of a 3D-printed part can be trusted
within a securely digitized distrib-
uted manufacturing ecosystem.