Mauro Prevostini

“Smart” infrastructure has become one of the buzziest bits of IT jargon over the last year, thanks to massive marketing pushes from companies including IBM, HP, and Cisco. The big idea: putting sensors everywhere that communicate in a mesh network and allow real-time tracking and optimization of everything from traffic to the power grid to the water supply.

But for security researchers, tying complex infrastructure systems to equally complex technology paints a bullseye on those “smart” sensor projects. In a talk at the Black Hat security conference in Barcelona, Greek researcher Thanassis Giannetsos presented a new software tool that he and two colleagues have written that they say would allow a malicious hacker to penetrate a sensor network and change or delete data at will.

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Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a tiny solar powered sensor - 1,000 times smaller than comparable commercial counterparts.

The system’s processor, solar cells, and battery are all contained in a frame measuring 2.5 x  3.5 x 1mm.  The system contains the ARM Cortex-M3 processor,  which uses about 2,000 times less power in sleep mode than its most energy-efficient counterpart on the market today.

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