The Internet of Things is a Bad Thing

 internet of things is a terribly bad idea. It's fun prognosticating about the shapes of things to come and the excitement level rises when we describe that democratic world where all devices and all people are connect, as one.

There is one major problem with this IOT concept: the internet. Much as we love the reach and appearance of democratization on this global network, it's security is frail, sieve-like and mostly broken.

Before the internet, distributed systems in the corporate world were robust, impenetrable and secure. And expensive. The deep layered security model of Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes comes to mind.

Enter the internet circus. Purchase internet access from a service provider in somebody's basement and the flower shop downtown could be as connected and present as the largest corporation. We lowered the deep security models and raised up beacons daring people to exploit us.

Now we come to that IOT thing which offers to connect mostly devices built with simplistic architecture- they are bit and clock aware to the extreme- that offers little or no security. Who would want to hack a stove? Unless one is designing life critical devices such as heart pacemakers, security is not there.

Connecting insecure devices opens the door to exploitation and invasions privacy which will surpass anything we have experienced to date. 

If we want to prognosticate about the shapes of things to come, let us imagine a world where one's heart pacemaker or one's electrical distribution system can be ransomed to the highest bidder. This is not going to work out well for us.

#security   #internet   #internetofthings   #lotusnotes  #securitymodel   #embeddedsystems   #devices