IOTSWC ’22 Interview Series – Andrei Costin

How did a university Computer Science laboratory from a small city in central Finland become an EU leader in data management? We caught up with Dr. Andrei Costin from Binare.io at the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona.

The Sky’s the Limit

Binare.io is a deep-tech cybersecurity startup. Originally a lab at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland in 2020, Binare.io brings cybersecurity research from the lab to the wider industry.


The flagship product at Binare.io is an automated firmware security-analysis solution. It automatically analyses cybersecurity for software in tandem for IoT, industrial IoT, embedded, and connected devices. As well, Binare.io provides advisory consulting services that complement their technology offerings, helping customers in different verticals such as networking, aerospace, or avionics to make their mission critical systems more secure.

EU Hubs 4 Data

Currently, Binare.io is running about ten European projects of various sizes. The EUHubs4Data project is one of their flagship European endeavours, which has brought several accolades. The goal of this project
is to leverage the Binare.io platform is a mature product that scans the firmware and software of about 14,000 kinds of devices and firmware. They have discovered about 7 million non-unique vulnerabilities
across the entire spectrum.

Using this enormous and complete dataset, Binare.io builds additional insights for various machine learning models on top of it. The EGI was a crucial player as well, providing a high performance data centre and computing solutions. The team can leverage it to process a big amount of data in a relatively short time.

Binare.io is on a continuous search for innovation, implementing new solutions and new features or supporting customers according to their needs. Today and tomorrow, they work to add important features, such as automated certification or simplification. The regulatory landscape for IoT is becoming stronger and stronger. The requirements will be more tough, more important, and more necessary.

Rising to the the Next Level

It is important to have automated solutions where platforms such as Binare.io, in combination with partners, would bring certification faster and more affordably to customers. Some other features of note are the SBOM, or software building material. SBOM is another core piece of the latest supply chain security and is a core piece of the trillion-dollar cybersecurity budget sought by the Biden administration in the US. Its goal is to create a bill of material for all IoT devices to know what is inside. This would be like a packaged food ingredient list but for the software. Binare.io’s platform is well fit for that task, as they reverse engineer the firmware and software and can look inside and provide this software bill of material or SBOM in basically one click.

In the coming year, Binare.io is working on a couple of very exciting partnerships, extending their business tech with a coyly unnamed major partner. They are excited to integrate their expertise knowledge and technology closer to the hardware security level and the connectivity level like network monitoring and scanning or network visibility in real time. Integrating with partners that perform device management and have good visibility on what is required in terms of cybersecurity is also on the horizon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>