Why Embedded Devices Struggle with Security

So embedded devices generally are very, very purpose built, which means the amount of memory, the amount of CPU processing and the amount of resources that they have are very much constrained to just fixing and performing the task that they're designed to do. um So, you know, you have limited flash memory. Some devices operate with only just a couple of hundred kilobytes of storage, just enough to store their firmware. or anything else that they need. It makes it hard to include these full encryption libraries that are needed to protect all of their data, either in transit internally or if they're sending out data via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. You know, those crypto libraries libraries can be rather big. And some of these embedded devices just don't have the bandwidth to support that. They have low CPU power. They can't run that heavy crypto, that real time scanning or even just simple anomaly detection in their code. So let's say we get the firmware, we change the firmware, we re-upload it. There's nothing scanning that firmware to say, hey, something is different. The checksums aren't matching. I'm not going to run this. And honestly, just real time demand. Sometimes, you know, the reason people are hesitant with security sometimes that it offers a lot of overhead. You know, cybersecurity doesn't make a system run faster. it doesn't make, let's say, in a missile, it doesn't make the missile fly further. it can offer a burden on the resources. So when you have things like automotive, medical device, you have cybersecurity adding latency, um it can disrupt sometimes safety critical aspects of the embedded device. So that is definitely a big pushback.