Cyber Security Awareness Month & the Internet of Vulnerable Things

Did you know that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the US? While I usually emphasize the enormous potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), let’s use the occasion to look at the security risks of the Internet of really vulnerable things.

Over the last couple of months, a casual observer could have noticed a variety of security scares related to “connected things†– from hacked baby monitors to hacked cars. Regulators have started to take notice and felt compelled to act.

Given that the problems appear to be systemic, what can companies do to mitigate the risks for connected devices? Rather than looking for yet another technological solution, my advice would be to apply common sense. It’s an industry-wide problem, not because of a lack of technology but because security and privacy are afterthoughts in the product design process. To get a feeling for the sheer scale of the problem, I suggest taking a look at the search engine Shodan. Both SiliconANGLE and Forbes have recently run articles covering some its findings.

Yet these problems did not start with IoT. For instance, Siemens was shipping industrial controllers with hardcoded passwords before the dawn of IoT – enabling the now infamous Stuxnet attack. Despite all the publicity, there are still vulnerabilities in industrial control systems, as noted in a Dark Reading article from the beginning of the year.

All the best practices and technologies needed to address these problems exist and can be applied today. But it is a people (designer, developer, consumer) problem and a (product design) process problem, not a technology problem. Designing fail-close (rather than fail-open) systems, using meaningful authentication, authorization and encryption settings and so on – all of this can be done today with little or no additional effort.

Essentially, our legal process has not caught up with technology. And it won’t for as long as the lack of security merely inconveniences us rather than threatening us with loss of property – or even life! Conversely, we are pretty good at applying security best practices in aviation because most serious problems with an aircraft in flight are inherently catastrophic. So, let’s hope that the recent news of hackers accessing airplane flight control systems acts as a wake-up call for the industry.

As advisors in API Management, we are, more often than not, actively involved in shaping the API security policies and best practices of our customers. Since we believe APIs will form the glue that will hold IoT together, we are using our API Academy to disseminate API best practices in a vendor-neutral way. Most of what we have learned regarding scalability, resilience and security from the SOA days is still applicable in the API space and will be applicable in the IoT space. As the magnitude of interconnectedness grows, security remains paramount.