[Blog] Future Cybersecurity Trends and Technologies to Watch

Cybersecurity best practices can change on a dime. To help our customers keep up with this rapidly changing field, Lattice runs a regular Security Seminar program where security and FPGA experts dive into the latest security trends, regulations, and implementation across the Communications, Computing, Industrial, Automotive, and Consumer markets. Our goal is to deliver security-relevant insights, real signals, and a sense of what's next, especially if you're building, deploying, or managing trusted systems.

In the latest Security Seminar , Lattice security experts provided a comprehensive overview of the latest security trends emerging globally from major industry events such as CES, MWC, Embedded World, and NVIDIA GTC. These events offer unique perspectives on the evolving approaches to trust, Zero Trust architecture, post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and cyber resilience needs.

Trend #1: AI Security Needs and Capabilities
Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be the topic that’s guiding discourse in cyberspace and show floors, and growing trust among users is at the center of it all. Though AI models can enhance efficiency and productivity in business settings and streamline everyday tasks (like driving, for example), they offer similar advantages to bad actors. Furthermore, the more deeply engrained in enterprise systems AI becomes, the larger the attack surface grows.

To adequately address this growing risk, the industry will need to approach AI security from two angles:

• AI applied to security: We’ll need to use AI to identify gaps in data protection, helping teams understand the full scope of their exposure and take action to ensure holistic coverage.
• Security applied to AI: We’ll need to find ways to ensure the security of AI solutions to prevent malicious actors from corrupting data used to make critical decisions. Data provenance , or the tracking of each data point’s movements and transformations from their origination onward, will be critical to prevent data poisoning and malicious training.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) play a crucial role in securing AI systems, providing flexibility and reprogrammability to adapt to evolving AI models, as well as built-in security functions like encryption and authentication with hardware root of trust (HRoT) and platform firmware resiliency (PFR). These technologies provide a robust and adaptable framework for secure AI deployment, ensuring that models can be trusted, verified, and updated as new security challenges arise.

Trend #2: The Importance of Cyber Resilience
Many of this year’s conference conversations have centered on cyber resilience, asking how organizations prepare and secure their systems in the face of a constantly changing threat landscape. The accelerating pace of technological change has created new vulnerabilities across industries, including many organizations in the Telecommunications and Industrial sectors.

Much of this is a result of increasing interconnectivity, as more distributed systems are brought together in the pursuit of accessibility. By connecting these distributed and embedded systems, the attack landscape is broadened once more, creating additional vulnerabilities. This has resulted in evolving regulations like the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the ISA/IEC 62443, which provide updated international standards that are actively shaping how companies are approaching cybersecurity.

Ultimately, organizations need to be able to rely on secure data from their distributed systems, ensuring that nothing has been manipulated or corrupted in transit. FPGAs like the Lattice MachXO5D™-NX family can serve as HRoT solutions, ensuring data integrity and enabling real-time monitoring and updates for distributed systems. This is crucial for industries like automotive, robotics, and critical infrastructure, which need to maintain integrity while remaining adaptable to changing standards and requirements.

Trend #3: The Growth of PQC
A final notable topic of conversation at these events was the fast-growing focus on the development and support of post-quantum cryptography capabilities. PQC focuses on the development and standardization of cryptographic algorithms that are secure against attacks from both classical computers and future quantum computers.

PQC is not itself a new topic, but its relevance had until recently seemed far off. Most in the cyber industry previously agreed that there was plenty of time to develop solutions before quantum computing was advanced enough to pose a threat. However, due to recent developments in quantum computing technology, the PQC conversation has burst back into the mainstream with significant energy and urgency. Operators are worried about how they should plan for the potential rapid evolution of PQC, unsure of how to maintain the agility required to keep pace with these developments.

As-is, most existing hardware will be unable to handle the requirements of PQC algorithms. This requires teams to adopt hardware that can not only meet their current computing and security needs, but also remain adaptable to the future needs associated with PQC. FPGAs’ innate flexibility, programmability, and parallel processing capabilities empower developers to keep up with evolving security standards, refine embedded hardware, and patch vulnerabilities in their distributed systems. The unique crypto agility available in some Lattice RoT devices allows for seamless in-field updates, enabling teams to implement PQC algorithms when and where they are developed and required.

Looking Towards Future-Proof Security
The consensus from these multi-event discussions is clear: flexibility, adaptability, and resilience are crucial components of any future-proof cybersecurity plan. As industries and technologies continue to evolve, staying ahead of new threats—whether they come in the form of AI models or post-quantum cyberattacks—requires adaptable solutions like Lattice’s robust lineup of security-focused FPGAs to ensure that systems remain secure and agile.

To learn more about these conversations and prepare for the future of cybersecurity, watch our full Security Seminar. If you’d like to learn more about how Lattice FPGA solutions can help secure and future-proof your system designs, reach out to our team.