Sternum rolls out a free license for its platform this week, with no time limit for use. This means IoT companies can actually deploy the company’s elite security and observability suite on any OpenWrt device at no charge. The move marks the first time a company has offered free protection of OpenWrt, and Sternum sees it as an opportunity to showcase the effectiveness of its platform.
“Integrating IoT security is perceived to be complicated to deploy and detrimental to the performance of the very devices it aims to protect,” says Natali Tshuva, CEO and Co-Founder of Sternum. “We decided to open our platform to the OpenWrt community to show that it doesn’t have to be this way. By providing robust no-strings-attached security for home users and small businesses, our goal is to drive a paradigm shift and pave a way for a more standardized, secure, and competent IoT ecosystem.”
The free license is in addition to the premium license Sternum provides for RTOS devices (e.g., Zephyr, FreeRTOS, VxWorks, Micrium, etc.) and all other embedded Linux distributions.
OpenWrt is a popular open-source Linux distribution that powers millions of routers, including those deployed at critical infrastructure hubs. Although versatile, powerful, and effective, it is still vulnerable to exploits ranging from remote code execution to buffer overflow, which give hackers the means to take control of a device. A successful IoT hack exploiting these vectors can take a major toll on a business, in downtime and data loss, if not worse.
As the IoT space lags behind in terms of security practices, it overwhelmingly relies on costly patching to combat known vulnerabilities. This reactive strategy is notoriously costly, slow, and difficult to implement, owing to the often isolated and/or embedded nature of IoT devices and the increased velocity with which new vulnerabilities are disclosed. Moreover, even when fully mastered, it offers no protection from zero-day vulnerabilities.
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When trying to minimize the reliance on patching through the use of other integrated security solutions, organizations often face a cumbersome deployment process and unacceptable overhead for the target device, resulting in poorer performance. This turns even a trial of a security product into a major investment of time and resources.
With its free license, lightweight footprint solution, and agile deployment model, Sternum offers companies a way around these issues, empowering the OpenWrt community to experience a new standard for security and observability.
