A little more than a month from now, the world’s attention will shift to San Francisco for the annual RSA Security Conference – perhaps the biggest single IT security industry event of the year. But this week, at a much smaller venue, the focus will be about what’s amounting to the ‘next big thing’ in the security world: the Internet of Things. The Amphion Forum focuses on a growing part of the computer security landscape that still struggles for attention in a security market still focused on the needs of large companies. Namely: the security challenges posed by mobile devices – phones and tablets and a menagerie of newly-connected endpoints, from wearable computers to implantable medical devices to household appliances. The privacy and security challenges facing organizations that wish to embrace the IoT are legion. Intelligent devices have been shown to lack basic protections against unauthorized access, such as strong […]
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Open Source IoT Platform Would Boost Security
Interoperability (or the lack of it) stands out as one of the major obstacles to the expansion of the Internet of Things. As we’ve discussed on this blog, the lack of a common platform for Internet-enabled devices to communicate on has resulted in a balkanized IoT landscape. Nest’s smart thermometer and smoke detector communicate and share information famously, but if you want to link them with some smart appliance from GE or LG, you’re out of luck. But that may soon be changing. On Tuesday, The Linux Foundation announced a new, cross industry consortium of major IT infrastructure makers, software vendors and electronics firms. The AllSeen Alliance is tasked with developing a common, open source platform that allows hardware and software firms to unite their creations, regardless of their brand – and provide basic security features, to boot. The Alliance counts electronics giants like Panasonic, Qualcomm, LG and Sharp as […]
ThingWorx Says IoT Marketplace Will Speed Adoption
ThingWorx, the ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) vendor, has made empowering the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything) its rallying cry. Now the company says it is the first to market with an IoT “marketplace” that it claims will speed development of smart, connected products. The company announced ThingWorx Marketplace at Salesforce.com’s “Dreamforce” event in San Francisco on Monday. The new platform will allow ThingWorx and third party firms to offer “components and services” that are needed to build full-featured IoT applications. Those may be things like new kinds of sensors, widgets, device connectors, protocol adapters, hooks into device clouds or integrations with enterprise management platforms, according to a ThingWorx statement. The platform will be accessible by ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers, the company said. Enterprises will be able to deploy private instances of the Marketplace to host internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, […]
Podcast: Securing The Internet of Things
One of the most vexing problems created by the fast-evolving Internet of Things is how to secure the massive trove of data that is transmitted and then stored by smart devices such as automobiles, consumer and household electronics and personal devices. As we’ve seen, private sector firms have been aggressive in leveraging new technology to connect their products to the Internet. But less thought has been given to the security and privacy implications of doing so. Now people are starting to take notice. In recent weeks, the FTC settled a case with a California firm, TRENDNet over balky home surveillance cameras they sold – cameras that were discovered to be easily discoverable and hackable from the public Internet. But, with so many cooks in the IoT kitchen (so to speak), where does responsibility for securing technology lie? Recently, I chatted with an expert on security and the Internet of Things. […]
SANS’ Pescatore: Security Needs Rethink For Internet Of Things
Our friends over at InfoSecurity Magazine have an interesting interview with SANS’ Director of Emerging Security Trends John Pescatore about security and The Internet of Things. Pescatore gets a somewhat skeptical hearing from the enterprise-focused IT security publication. (“Granted, it’s unlikely that anyone would be sending a car an email with a malicious executable, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t threat vectors for hackers to exploit,” InfoSecurity opines, by way of an introduction. Oh really?) But Pescatore brings a “deep field” view to this topic, noting that the security issues around IoT are already upon us in the spent almost two decades as Gartner’s Obi-Wan Kenobi for security, where he advised companies and technology vendors on the best way to navigate the shifting sands of the IT security space. Speaking to InfoSecurity, Pescatore says the 100,000 foot message is: ‘let’s learn from our mistakes.’ Specifically, that means not looking at intelligent devices, including […]
