The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be the next big investment area for many organizations as the value of real-time data keeps on increasing in this hyper competitive world.
Cisco CEO states that IoT is going to be a 19 trillion $ opportunity. Coca Cola has blocked 16 million mac addresses that would be utilized for its smart vending machines. In the Healthcare space, increasing survival rates have resulted in an aging population. With age comes chronic illness and to address this, Payers and Providers are investing in home-care appliances to monitor patient data - heart/pulse rate, temperature, glucose level, etc.
The next couple of years would see a plethora of smart devices connected to the internet and this presents a very challenging security problem. Already poorly secured smart devices have been hacked and compromised. Fridges have been used to send spam messages. Smart TVs are spying on viewers home network.
One of the fundamental non-technical challenge is that manufactures of IoT devices have very little incentive to invest in patching old sensors/devices for security. The supply chain starts from the MCU (micro-controller) manufacturer to the OEM and these folks are busy releasing new versions of their products and do not have the time and energy to patch their old products for security. A very good article describing this is available here.
On the technology front, the challenge is that sensor devices have limited resources for implementing industry standard encryption techniques. A typical sensor (MCU - Micro Controller Unit) would just have a processor of 32MHz and 256KB memory. Also most sensor systems are proprietary and closed, making it difficult to patch security updates in a open way.
There is no easy solution to the above problem. The only hope is that the newer MCUs developed for IoT devices have enough processing power to support digital certificates. Using Digital certificates enables us to satisfy all facets of enterprise security - a) Authentication b)Authorization c) Integrity d)Confidentiality e)Non-Repudiation.
Verizon has a comprehensive suite of products for enabling IoT security using PKI/digital certificate technologies.
Cisco CEO states that IoT is going to be a 19 trillion $ opportunity. Coca Cola has blocked 16 million mac addresses that would be utilized for its smart vending machines. In the Healthcare space, increasing survival rates have resulted in an aging population. With age comes chronic illness and to address this, Payers and Providers are investing in home-care appliances to monitor patient data - heart/pulse rate, temperature, glucose level, etc.
The next couple of years would see a plethora of smart devices connected to the internet and this presents a very challenging security problem. Already poorly secured smart devices have been hacked and compromised. Fridges have been used to send spam messages. Smart TVs are spying on viewers home network.
One of the fundamental non-technical challenge is that manufactures of IoT devices have very little incentive to invest in patching old sensors/devices for security. The supply chain starts from the MCU (micro-controller) manufacturer to the OEM and these folks are busy releasing new versions of their products and do not have the time and energy to patch their old products for security. A very good article describing this is available here.
On the technology front, the challenge is that sensor devices have limited resources for implementing industry standard encryption techniques. A typical sensor (MCU - Micro Controller Unit) would just have a processor of 32MHz and 256KB memory. Also most sensor systems are proprietary and closed, making it difficult to patch security updates in a open way.
There is no easy solution to the above problem. The only hope is that the newer MCUs developed for IoT devices have enough processing power to support digital certificates. Using Digital certificates enables us to satisfy all facets of enterprise security - a) Authentication b)Authorization c) Integrity d)Confidentiality e)Non-Repudiation.
Verizon has a comprehensive suite of products for enabling IoT security using PKI/digital certificate technologies.
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