for Brillo and Weave.

I hope you've had a great day seeing all the talks here

at the Ubiquity conference.

As you can see, we've had a whole bunch

of really cool information just come out today

about Brillo and Weave and all the exciting possibilities

that it has.

My name's Wayne Piekarski, and I'm

a Developer Advocate at Google.

I work with the product teams to communicate information

to developers and also feed information

back to the product teams to help make our products better,

and so forth.

So we all work together, and we run events like this,

and so we hope you found it very useful.

What we thought we'd do is have a session where we can sit down

with some of the important people on the Brillo and Weave

team-- talk to them about what makes

them do the things that they do, and what they find interesting,

and what kind of ideas that they have.

So today, we have three speakers.

We've got Ryan Cairns, we've got Paul Westbrook,

and we've got Guarav Shah.

And what I'll do is I'll start off

by just asking them to say a little bit about what

they do at Google and what their important role is.

RYAN CAIRNS: Sure.

My name's Ryan.

I'm an engineering director.

I run the Brillo and Weave project.

I started the project about three years ago.

And I take care of all the engineering stuff.

PAUL WESTBROOK: My name is Paul Westbrook.

I'm the engineering lead of Weave.

We're focusing on the mobile device side and server

side of Weave.

GUARAV SHAH: Hey, I'm Guarav.

I'm the engineering lead for Brillo.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Cool.

Thanks.

I was hoping with the Fireside Chat,

we'd have an actual fireplace here.

But we don't have that.

They wouldn't let us run a fireplace screen on this thing.

Anyway, today we had the little pet feeder during the keynote.

That's something where I was like,

you know what, I really want this pet feeder,

because it solves a problem that I have.

And so I thought it would be a really cool question to ask.

What magic device have you always wanted

that, now that we have Brillo and Weave,

you maybe could build-- or someone else could

build-- and sell it as a product or whatever?

What's something that's exciting?

Guarav?

GUARAV SHAH: I guess my dream project is, all the walls are

screens, and it's easy for me to project anything

on any of the screens, or rather, the walls.

So that's what I would like to be able to prototype.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: I guess some of these little boards

were giving-- they have like, little HDMI ports on them,

so you could do something like that pretty easily.

GUARAV SHAH: Absolutely.

And you can also drive LEDs and LCD screens via the [INAUDIBLE]

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Yeah.

Actually, one of my colleagues had

this cool project where they were

controlling strips of lights and they were blinking,

all kinds of things.

And there's all kinds of cool possibilities of little things

you can do that doesn't require a massive screen,

but you can use really cheap little components

to make something interesting.

GUARAV SHAH: Yeah.

Definitely.

You can daisy chain them, and yeah.

Pretty exciting.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Cool.

What about you, Paul?

PAUL WESTBROOK: One of the things that I want to build

is something to control my garage door.

Because oftentimes, I will-- I'm always

worried about leaving it open.

RYAN CAIRNS: Well, then you just drive your car

and come back home and check again, and then drive off.

Right?

PAUL WESTBROOK: Well, that, but then-- you're wasting gas.

But the other thing is making sure the lights turn

on and off, especially to detect presence.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: I was thinking I've always wanted something

where it's like-- what's the state of all the doors?

Show me every time they opened, show me

a log or something interesting like that.

Because the door may have been opened unexpectedly

or something like that.

Yeah, it's interesting.

What about you?

RYAN CAIRNS: For me, it was really--

I was working on Chromebooks at the time,

and we were doing a bunch of Wi-Fi stuff.

And I really wanted a Wi-Fi router that was easy to use.

So I'd kick that product off.

And then, beyond products, one of the reasons

that we did Brillo and Weave in the first place was we

just saw people wrestling with the same set of problems

over and over again.

Google was getting into doing hardware.

Everybody was fighting to figure out, OK,

what Wi-Fi solution do I need to use?

What Bluetooth solution do I need to use?

How's auto-update going to work?

What's my security story?

And we already solved a bunch of that

stuff, so we were looking at, how do we package that up

for people?

That was really my goal with this.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Yeah.

Security is an interesting thing.

Because I always have this terrifying thought of, well,

if my heater is controlled by my computer, and someone hacks

into it, they can set my house on fire or something like that.

So security seems a really big deal

that you really have to get this right.

And so, what kind of things are we

doing to make sure that security--

because it seems like that's like the number one priority

for a lot of things nowadays.

So what are we doing to make it really awesome?

RYAN CAIRNS: There's a few things.

At a high level, we're working on some platform security

features in the OS, and we'll let Guarav talk

about that in a second.

We're enabling software updates, because we

don't think that you can have a security solution with devices

being fixed in the field.

You always need to be able to push new code to them.

And then on the Weave side, I'll let Paul talk

to what we're doing about local authentication and things

like that.

GUARAV SHAH: So yeah, I can speak to the Brillo side.

Interestingly, before I was working on Brillo,

I was working on Chromebook security.

And we ended up designing a very defense in-depth model

for building a very secure device.

And that's pretty much been verified time and time again

based on various security competitions and intrusion

detection-- the performance of Chromebooks

at these kind of events.

So for Brillo, I think there are a couple of things that

are in boat on the platform.

So verified boot, which makes sure

that you're not running malicious code on your device.

I think that's a core part of the security,

and we talk about verified boot starting

from when your device boots up, so all the code that runs

is verified.

Then the other thing that you want to enable

is, we want to enable sandboxing and other mechanisms that

are default on and that are very easy to use.

So we have kind of build a lot of the same technologies

that Android already has, plus some of the things

that we designed for Chromebooks,

like second BPF and other sandboxing mechanisms.

These are a core part of Brillo.

The final part that Ryan alluded to is updates.

We really feel that updates are really

a core part of building a secure device,

because anything you build, any software you write,

it's always going to have bugs.

And being able to update this device in the field,

and doing so in a way that is very seamless, non-destructive,

error-free is very important.

And so update is a core part of Brillo security as well.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: I guess one other thing

is that a lot of OEMs will make a device,

then they just forget about it, whereas at least Google

does some of the work of doing the security patches.

And you can just pull down updates and build it out

without having to have your own team maintaining all these.

You don't have to worry so much about security.

GUARAV SHAH: Yeah.

I think a large part of why we don't see a lot of updates

happening in the field is that it's kind of always the device

side, the device software.

But there's also infrastructure for running updates,

for actually serving the updates, for managing updates.

And with Brillo, we are making that something that

is the same infrastructure that we use in Google,

for Chromebooks and other devices,

and we are making that available for developers

to use for their devices.

So I really feel like that really

makes updates a no-brainer, if you're

building a connected device using Brillo and Weave.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: See, I've got to focus on feeding dogs.

I don't want to worry about all that stuff.

RYAN CAIRNS: Just to add to the update story--

one of the big things is like, when people are shipping

devices that don't update themselves--

the whole internet is moving forward all the time, right?

People are building new code.

So those devices are just going to break over time.

They're going to bit rot.

The user is going to buy an experience today,

and in a year, that experience is going to be broken.

And what we really want to enable

is an always up-to-date, always working experience,

for devices that get better, as opposed to degrade over time.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Yeah.

You want to say something, Paul?

PAUL WESTBROOK: Yes, I was going to talk about the Weave side.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Sure.

RYAN CAIRNS: So on the Weave side, one of the benefits of it

is actually dealing with the Google Clouds.

So the devices themselves actually

have a secure connection to the Google Cloud,

so they can ensure that the commands that

are received by the device are actually authenticated

to come from Google.

And then also, the other part is actually the authentication,

or actually, the sharing model.

So the user has ultimate control over which

user, as well as which applications,

have access to their device.

And so then they can both grant access as well as

be able to revoke it, in case there's

a bad actor or some behavior that's actually not expected.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Well, that's the thing.

I mean, there's the possibility of bad actors

at so many places in the chain that it's very important

that you secure everything.

You can't just get away with having some parts secure

and some parts not.

PAUL WESTBROOK: We agree.

And in addition to the cloud connection,

Weave also has local authentication.

So when commands-- like for example,

let's say the internet connection goes down.

So commands that go between a phone to a device,

we can still ensure that that communication

is secure as well.

WAYNE PIEKARSKI: Cool.

So one question I hear people ask me every so

often is, so we've got Weave.

And then we have Nest, which have their own IoT

story as well.