Medicine

Smart Meters

Verizon: New Cloud Encryption Service Will Secure IoT Devices

Identity is one of the biggest challenges facing companies that are deploying products for the “Internet of Things,” as well as traditional enterprises that find IoT technologies of all types knocking at the door. The question, in short, is “how do I know that this device is legitimate, and ties back to an identity that I trust with access to my network resources and data? Of course, identity management has always been an aching problem in the enterprise space. The problem with the IoT is scale – given the sheer size of the IoT (30 billion connected devices by 2020), you can add a few “zeros” onto the number of devices that could, potentially, be seeking access to your network at any time. [Related read: Identity Management’s Next Frontier: The Interstate] It makes sense that, in a distributed environment like that, the cloud may be the best place to address […]

US FTC Seal

FTC Taps Data Privacy, Security Experts For Top Posts

Amid high-profile scandals over government spying and concerns about the security of individuals’ data, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointed experts in privacy and data security to two senior positions this week.   FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez on Monday announced the appointments of Latanya Sweeney as the agency’s Chief Technologist and Andrea Matwyshyn as a Senior Policy Advisor on privacy and data security issues. The appointments bring expertise in data privacy into the FTC’s senior ranks, as the agency wrestles with the implications of headlong expansion of Internet connected device, sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Sweeney is a professor of government and technology at Harvard University and the founder and director of Harvard’s data privacy lab. A Ph.D in computer science with degrees from Harvard and MIT, her research has focused on the de-identification of data, developing privacy technologies, and the protection of health information, according to the FTC. At […]

Veracode Talking Code

BlueTooth on Your Defibrillator? The Case Against Wi-Fi

As more and more devices become networked, the use cases for wireless communications protocols like Bluetooth and NFC (Near Field Communications) multiply. Hardly a week goes by where some company figures out a way to pair wireless communications with some inanimate object or another. (Bluetooth bike locks, anyone?) But what happens when those wireless devices run critical infrastructure or life-saving technology like implanted medical devices? We learned earlier this week that no less than Dick Cheney was concerned enough about wireless attacks on his implanted defibrillator that he had the wireless management features of the device disabled, for fear they could be used in an assassination attempt. Security experts, like Dr. Kevin Fu at The University of Michigan,  doubtful that such an attack was realistic, also refused to rule it out entirely. Given the many, proven tools and strategies for hacking wireless communications like Bluetooth, you might think that foregoing well […]

Thin-Film-Electronics-ASA-stand-alone-tag

Printable Smart Labels Warn When The Milk’s Gone Bad

What’s been called “The Internet of Things” or “The Internet of Everything” is a revolution in computing that has seen the population of Internet connected “stuff” skyrocket. By 2020, there will be an estimated 50 billion devices connected to the Internet (or whatever its called then). Today, the list of IP-enabled stuff is already long: phones, automobiles, household appliances, clothing. But, under the hood, a lot of these devices really aren’t much different from the PCs that grace our desks. They have hard drives, CPUs, memory, input devices, and so on. Most are still assembled in factories by humans and machines. This can be done cheaply and, in some cases, automated. But it’s still a labor-intensive and expensive process. But what if you could just “print” working electronics like, say, The New York Times prints its daily newspaper (at least for now!)?   That would change everything. For one thing: […]

News Roundup: Plundering The Internet Of Things

There were two interesting pieces on the fast-evolving topic of security and the Internet of Things that are worth reading. The first is a long piece by Bob Violino over at CSO that takes the pulse of the IoT and security question right now. The big picture: its early days, but that there are some troubling trends.   The vast expansion of IP-enabled devices is matched by a lack of security know-how at device makers, Violino writes. And, as the environment of “smart devices” grows, the interactions between those devices become more difficult to anticipate – especially as devices start sharing contextual data and taking actions based on that data. “As machines become autonomous they are able to interact with other machines and make decisions which impact upon the physical world,” notes Andrew Rose, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Rose says. “But these are coded by […]