Story Lines That Will Be the Most Relevant at CES 2017

Story Three: Insecurity of Things Still a Very Big Thing

Curran: “The insecurity of things is again going to be a very big thing at CES 2017.”

• We learned at last year’s show that IoT is not immune to one of the market’s most vexing issues: security.
• Concerns about security will continue to be pervasive at CES 2017. In fact, don’t be surprised if the security story at this year’s show is even more profound at this year’s show than last year’s. There is no way the IoT market will reach its great potential until these security challenges are overcome.
• The seriousness of these security concerns were described in a new U.S. Department of Homeland Security report titled, “Strategic Principles for Security the Internet of Things,” which says:
• “The time to address IoT security is now. Many of the vulnerabilities in IoT could be mitigated through recognized security practices, but too many products today do not incorporate even basic security measures. There is a lack of incentives for developers to adequately secure products, since they do not necessarily bear the costs of failing to do so. While the benefits of IoT are undeniable, the reality is that security is not keeping up with innovation.”

• These insights underscore the serious potential impacts security breaches can have for businesses. A recent security attack underscores the severity of this problem. Dyn, a company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, suffered in October a severe distributed denial of service attack that flooded its servers with so many fake requests for information that they could not respond to real ones. The servers crashed.
• Unknown hackers took down the company’s routing network, which allowed them to knock offline many popular websites such as Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix. By hacking into unsecured IoT devices, mainly home surveillance cameras, hackers took control of these devices to attack other devices on the network, which served as a gateway to take down the company’s routers and attack the entire corporate infrastructure including the popular websites.
• These types of IoT devices are easily hackable because they are designed to be accessed over a local network. They come with unsecured, hard-coded default passwords, which can be easily compromised.
• The ubiquity of IoT in the home is inevitable. The benefits — lower energy costs, greater security, more personalized services to name just a few — are too promising for this market not to succeed. This market opportunity will one day connect more people in their homes to more devices, more networks, more service providers, more applications, and more services than ever before.
• Watch for news about companies collaborating to develop core standards for application development, end-to-end security capabilities, data capturing technology, embedded analytics to extract the full value of data, consumer-friendly interfaces with easy-to-understand metrics, and higher bandwidth capabilities.
• Watch for companies that offer end-to-end security offerings for the IoT market including application development, device and application testing, embedded hardware and software, and connected products and platforms.

Story Four: Augmented Reality on page 4…

Originally published on eWeek