Slovakia-based startup Excalibur has picked up the top prize in Cisco’s IoT Security Grand Challenge.
Excalibur’s solution is focused on enabling future authentication infrastructure for the IoT era where authentication will be omnipresent and passwords will no longer exist.
The Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge fielded more than 100 online submissions from 33 countries, ultimately awarding $300,000 to four winners — each team receiving $75,000 in addition to exhibition space at the recently held IoT World Forum.
The other winners include the team of Cornell Tech and Rice University from the United States, which are working together to create physical proof-of-presence protocols for transient connections in the IoT and operating in backwards-compatible mode with legacy standards.
The Carnegie Mellon University team, also from the US, is creating a solution to control IoT privacy risks and trade-offs with Fog Mediation.
Germany-based Aircloak and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems is developing a technology and service that provides highly accurate aggregate analytics over use data while strongly protecting user privacy.
Cisco also announced the three winners of the concurrently held IoT Grand Innovation Challenge. Relayr from Germany won the top prize at $150,000. It is is providing simple and inexpensive tools that will accelerate developers’ ability to take advantage of IoT and start programming for the physical world around us.
Second place ($75,000) went to Waygum.io from California. It is connecting mobile devices to machinery and enabling developers to create mobile-enabled industrial applications. Third ($25,000) went to Toymail from Michigan. It is bringing IoT to toys and fostering communication between children and their families.