Things can only get Matter

  • October 28, 2024
  • Steve Rogerson

Steve Rogerson talks to Silicon Labs about the firm’s recent deal with Kudelski and all things Matter.

If the Matter standard goes to plan, we should be due another update in November, or thereabouts, and I must say that I have been impressed so far with how the roll out has gone. I have seen many attempts over the years to unify standards in various industries, and often they just add to the confusion rather than making things simpler.

With Matter, that has not been the case. Its goal from the start was to create a smart-home world where devices from any manufacturer could work with each other. There is still a whole lot of educating to do before the general public trying to smarten their homes realises the benefits, but the work behind the scenes has been going on pretty much as planned.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance’s last update back in May – Matter 1.3 – added energy and water management support, EV charging equipment, leak and freeze detectors, and various cooking and laundry devices. We should soon know what will be in the next version.

However, this month a story caught my eye and that was Texas-based wireless technology firm Silicon Labs working with Kudelski’s IoT division to help manufacturers do the necessary security bits. Now, as I mentioned in a previous blog on Matter, Infineon was tackling the DAC (device attestation certificate) problem to help manufacturers insert these DACs into their products.

This latest partnership is trying to do much the same thing by combining Silicon Labs’ secure trusted manufacturing capabilities with Kudelski’s certified Matter PKI service. This means IoT manufacturers can now have Matter DACs securely injected during production, streamlining the path to Matter volume manufacturing.

“Kudelski was an obvious choice,” said Rohit Ravichandran, security product manager at Silicon Labs, when I chatted with him last week. “They have proven expertise and we thought they would be a good fit.”

He said for a manufacturer to inject DACs and private keys into their devices in a secure way would involve high investment in terms of equipment.

“So we thought we can offer a way to do this,” said Rohit. “We can make the manufacturing process more streamlined.”

So far, it has to be said, Matter has been fairly lucky – maybe not the right word – on the security front and has not had any bad headlines about security breaches, which is good because people don’t like the thought that their smart home devices can be hacked. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been security issues, as Rohit’s colleague Rob Alexander, Silicon Labs’ Matter product manager, told me in the same meeting, but the problems have been at the friendly hacker level rather than by so-called bad actors. These were dealt with.

“The alliance responded quickly and made sure there was a fix,” said Rob. “Matter has a healthy ecosystem. This one was found by a friendly audit of the codebase. We have not seen any malicious ones yet.”

However, he said to make sure Matter was secure, they would need friendly and unfriendly people to pressure-test the system. But he is not unduly worried, after all Matter has been born at a time when software and protocol best practices are well known.

Rohit added: “We have an internal security response team that monitors activities by the good guys and the not-so-good guys. We work very closely with our Matter development team to address these issues.”

Overall, Rob thinks Matter has been going well.

“There has been huge interest,” he said. “It definitely solves some problems. There are challenges and bugs to work out and some rough edges we need to improve. We are focussing now on energy management and smart video cameras.”

He said they were still seeing more companies adopting Matter, even some of those who sat on the sidelines at first to see how it went, but he admitted he would like to see more adoption.

“Some still want to be sure Matter is a workable standard and that it benefits them,” he said. “Hopefully, over time, there will be a critical mass and then it will take off. It will be easier to go with Matter than go for a proprietary device.”

Key to that was helping companies switch to Matter, which brings us back nicely to the Kudelski deal, as that is exactly what that is trying to do. The next Matter update should bring more household items into the fold and with companies such as Infineon and Silicon Labs making it easier for manufacturers to build Matter-enabled products, all is looking good.