Secured by Afero™ Devices Are Immune to Bluetooth KNOB Vulnerabilities

LOS ALTOS, Calif. - Aug. 27, 2019 - PRLog -- Afero (https://www.afero.io/), the next-generation IoT platform company, confirmed that the recently discovered Key Negotiation of Bluetooth, or KNOB (https://knobattack.com/), vulnerabilities do not affect IoT devices that are Secured by Afero™. The vulnerability would allow an attacker to intercept, eavesdrop, and alter communications between two paired devices.

One of the most serious vulnerabilities discovered in any connectivity technology, the KNOB attack goes to the root of the Bluetooth specification. It is invisible to the apps, operating systems, and Bluetooth devices and is presumed to affect virtually all Bluetooth devices. Researchers have reportedly (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/new-attack-exploiting-serious-bluetooth-weakness-can-intercept-sensitive-data/) "simulated attacks on 14 different Bluetooth chips and found all of them to be vulnerable". It is tracked as Vulnerability Note VU#918987.

The Afero IoT Platform™ supports several communication protocols, including Bluetooth. It is not affected by the KNOB vulnerability because it does not rely on the compromised Bluetooth pairing mechanism. Instead, Afero always employs the equivalent of a virtual private network (VPN) over Bluetooth.

"Trustworthy IoT has always been the design center for the Afero IoT Platform and is what powers Secured by Afero™ IoT solutions (https://www.afero.io/release/afero-launches-trustworthy-i...)," said Joe Britt, CEO and co-founder of Afero. "Afero is in a unique position to offer manufacturers pre-built, out-of-the-box, secure IoT that has proven to be immune to a long list of vulnerabilities."

A recent news article (https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/smart-home-hub-flaws-un...) served as yet another reminder of frequently discovered security flaws in connected devices, flaws that erode customer confidence and destroy brands.

The Afero IoT Platform represents the most secure IoT solution in the industry as it provides always-encrypted, always-authenticated, tunneled data paths, secure device and service identities backed by hardware roots of trust, secure supply chain, plus implements the full scope of security best practices. The Afero IoT Platform has been proven to provide security and ease of use at scale.

The Afero IoT Platform has established a strong reputation for security, speed, and robustness. In addition, Afero has built a strong set of partnerships (https://www.afero.io/partners/) across the IoT technology spectrum, including notable projects developed with Kenmore (https://youtu.be/IRQBeFtmWxE), D-Link (https://www.afero.io/release/afero-and-d-link-bring-innovative-iot-solution-to-the-insurance-industry/), and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (https://www.mufg.jp/english/). A recent independent study (https://parolaanalytics.com/parola-news/internet-of-things/) of the IoT patent landscape, conducted by Parola Analytics, placed Afero in the Top 5 IoT organizations globally.

About Afero

The Afero next-generation IoT platform accelerates time to market, provides hardened security from sensor to cloud and from factory to customers, simplifies onboarding to help maximize customer connections, and uses data ontology to streamline machine learning. The Afero Platform is supported by elastic, multi-cloud services that deliver reliability, responsiveness, and a new software engineering model that unifies embedded, mobile, and cloud development. Afero has assembled world-class mobile, hardware, security, and cloud veterans from Google, Apple, Nest, Danger, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix. To learn more about Afero, please visit www.afero.io.