The establishment of the Mobile App Security Working Group, (MAS), was announced at the Amphion Forum in San Francisco last week. Member companies will collaborate to develop security standards for mobile applications that interact with each other. The MAS charter members are Mocana, SAP, FireEye, McAfee and Wind River.
The rise of connectivity between industrial control systems is stimulating the need to develop these standards to govern secure mobile apps on all kinds of devices used in all sorts of environments. These situations may range from a war zone to a hospital emergency room, from a power plant to an automobile factory floor, explained AJ Shipley, Senior Director of Security Solutions at Wind River, an Intel subsidiary. One of the conference keynote speakers, Shipley said Intel forecasts there will be 15 billion connected devices online by 2015.
“The development of mobile apps in all kinds of industries with enterprise, military and consumer end users is only going to continue to accelerate,” Shipley added.
New industry standards will also help mobile companies grappling with malware. “The goal is to create an industry standard for sharing security relevant data so we can make more informed decisions closer to real time when malicious activities occur,” said Shipley. He added that securing the emerging IoT (Internet of Things) doesn’t require any new approaches. “What is required is adapting the IT security controls that have been refined over the past 25 years to the new use cases and the resource constrained environments of the IoT.”
Gail Bronson is an accomplished technology journalist and security start-up entrepreneur. She was the Founding Managing Editor of Bloomberg and the Founding Editor of Forbes Science & Technology section and she held stints at other publications including U.S. News & World Report and Internet Week.