The day is not far when virtually all the

electronic devices from phone to cars from

refrigerators to light switches will be

connected to internet and will create a huge

network of communication to make our life

easier. But are we really prepared for this?

Are we prepared for IoT?

Rathoud, Sameer

If futurists are right, we are going to enter

in an era where all the physical objects we

interact with on our daily basis, will gather

the data through sensors, connect to

internet and communicate with each other

through the buzzword and sci-fi movie worth

concept Internet of Things (IoT).

Optimist believes soon these daily usable

object will become intelligent and will make

our life easy. Tomorrow a refrigerator may

suggest you a recipe by looking at the

content in it. A light may get dim when you

are feeling sleepy. Your shoes may monitor

your health and suggest how much calorie

you should burn or even may be your shoes

will tell, how much calorie your friend has

burned. Your dress will monitor your health.

Our highways will be safer. Our house will be

more efficient. And may be every single idea

will become true with IoT tomorrow.

With IoT the devices will be connected to

various sensors. Through these sensors they

collect lot of data, analyze these data and

provide suggestion or take some action

based on the conclusion of data analysis.

But there might be the chances that the data

captured by these intelligent devices or data

flowing across the internet are highly

sensitive and private and by considering

privacy and security as stand these devices

provide a highly vulnerable point to hackers.

Instead of making our life easy as supposed

to be by these IoT devices, it can create

security havoc.

Few years back an incident came in notice,

where a malware worm named “Stuxnet”,

which was designed to attack industrial

programmable logic controller (PLC). PLCs

allow the automation of electromechanical

processes such as those used to control

machinery on factory assembly lines,

amusement rides, or centrifuges for

separating nuclear material. Exploiting four

zero-day flaws, Stuxnet functions by

targeting machines using the Microsoft

Windows operating system and networks,

then seeking out Siemens Step7 software.

Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian

PLCs, collecting information on industrial

systems and causing the fast-spinning

centrifuges to tear themselves apart.

Stuxnet’s design and architecture are not

domain-specific and it could be tailored as a

platform for attacking modern SCADA and

PLC systems.

Stuxnet reportedly ruined almost one-fifth

of Iran's nuclear centrifuges.

You can find more information on stuxnet at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet.

Although this example is not directly

portraying the vulnerability of IoT data. But

with this example we can imagine how badly

a malware can hurt any program.

Take another example where an intelligent

cooking range is supposed to do some basic

pre-processing before I reach home. And a

malware in my intelligent device can even

influence my house’s fire safety and can

burn my house.

We can anticipate an attack of the things,

when new connected devices cause

problems on networks in a variety of ways

including increasing network attack surface

(every new "thing" is a potential hackable

weak point), using up precious bandwidth,

generating mountains of sensitive data that

needs to be stored and secured, and usable

IP addresses as billions of new things

connect to networks worldwide.

Capturing the data from our intelligent

device’s sensors will be ok, until I am not

providing the intelligence to the controllers

as well or our data security system for these

IoT devices should be sound enough that I

can rely on the actions of my controller as

well.

May be tomorrow I will be flooded with

suggestions from my IoT devices, but

preferably I would like to own the actions

rather than these intelligent devices do it for

me (at least for now).

I don’t want to be very pessimist and we can

choose to ignore the impending onslaught of

ubiquitous connected devices. While this

might be OK for now, we can’t keep our head

in the sand for much longer by just thinking

of a TRAP!