IEEE Spectrum has an article that provides a nice overview of security and privacy issues on the Internet of Things. The article by Mark Anderson highlights a number of the issues that have cropped up on these pages as well, namely:
- the rush to market in the consumer IoT space (much of it driven by crowd funding sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter)
- the lack of a strong business case for (consumer) manufacturers to build security into IoT products
- the tendency of large manufacturers to pursue siloed security standards that thwart efforts to build devices interconnect with other IoT infrastructure (other devices, routers, etc.)
- So far efforts to coordinate IoT development around a single platform or set of standards have been reduced to predictable turf battles: Google’s Thread versus multi-vendor efforts like TheAllSeen Alliance, The Open Interconnect Consortium, The Industrial Internet Consortium versus Apple HomeKit and HealthKit and others.
In the absence of any clear industry-wide IoT security standards, Anderson wonders whether the time won’t soon be upon us in which a company makes a business around a secure IoT platform that “can manage all such secure transactions behind the scenes for the cornucopia of third-party IoT device makers—perhaps like antivirus software today is managed and regularly updated by a small set of private, specialized companies.”
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[Read Security Leverage coverage of IoT standards here]. |
Of course – that’s what companies like Xively and Axeda (now PTC) are about (at least in part) and its not clear that any one of those players or platforms is likely to become the “Microsoft” of the IoT ecosystem.
Check out the whole article over on IEEE Spectrum: Looking for the Key to Security in the Internet of Things – IEEE Spectrum.