McAfee and Wind River Announce Strategic Agreement for Security Protection Beyond the PC

The number of connected devices is increasing exponentially and is expected to grow to 50 billion by 2020, according to internal McAfee estimates. The lion's share of this growth is expected to come from traditional embedded and mobile device market segments such as industrial control, energy management, automotive, national infrastructure, defense, networking and smartphones as well as emerging segments including smart grid, connected home health care, home gateways and tablets. Historically, devices in the embedded market segment were discrete or had limited connectivity. However, today there is a big push to connect these devices to the enterprise and public networks.

This tsunami of connectivity is creating a huge increase in security vulnerabilities. A security breach of an embedded device (e.g., nuclear reactor controls, utility grid, defense communication system) could have serious implications. In addition, embedded devices are now targets of organized crime and nation states as evidenced by the recent Stuxnet attack.

Since embedded devices have technology requirements that differ from traditional IT equipment, namely limited power, memory and performance constraints, traditional security solutions are insufficient. Together McAfee and Wind River will offer purpose-built security and management solutions for this unique and explosive growing market segment.

Embedded devices are everywhere, allowing us to communicate and improve aspects of our daily lives, said Dave DeWalt, president and CEO, McAfee. These instrumental pieces of our lives also pose a great risk and securing them is imperative. The teaming of McAfee and Wind River will allow us to implement security measures to protect these critical devices and keep people more safe and secure.

Our customers across nearly all market segments have elevated embedded security to a top priority, said Ken Klein, president, Wind River. Together with McAfee, we will deliver the most comprehensive security solutions in the embedded industry, with security solutions designed to protect all layers of the software stack. This will address our customers’ concerns and protect their embedded devices as they are increasingly used on public and private networks.

McAfee and Wind River will offer protection and management capabilities to this exploding market of connected devices everywhere, with initial integrations between Wind River Linux and McAfee security solutions, followed by additional integrations with other Wind River operating systems and embedded virtualization technologies. A phased rollout of security solutions will be delivered in 2011. Additionally, Wind River will include McAfee security offerings in its future products to make it even easier for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to build secure devices.