COMMS+DATA
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SHIFTING PARADIGMS
IN THE AGE OF IoT Kirsty Jagger*
How many smart devices do you own? However many, it’s just the start.
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new Markets and Markets study estimates 15.4% growth in smart appliances in the next five years, which means that by 2020 these smart autonomous devices will reach 30 billion in number and the market will be worth about $52.6 billion. In particular, millions of consumers around the world are increasing the demand for smart home security products. But what are the security implications of smart security? To answer this all-important question, international security futurist Marc Goodman provided an insightful perspective in his address to ASIAL’s Security 2015 Conference in Melbourne. He said security devices moving into the digital realm will “create tremendous opportunities to improve security, but it’s also going to create its own risks and threats”.
dresses to each grain of sand on Earth! So more and more things are going online, hence the ‘Internet of Things’. “The challenge about it from the security side is we can’t even protect the devices that we have online today. The Internet of Things is just more things to be hacked. While we have been excellent at wiring the world, we have failed to secure it, and that’s something we need to give grave consideration to,” warned Goodman. “Not only are these new technologies creating massive security risks, but they are also opening up new challenges for law, public policy, regulation, privacy. So the technology is following Moore’s Law and is exponential — doubling, doubling, doubling — but all our traditional legacy systems are completely analog and linear and so we’re really headed for some very interesting times ahead.”
Size and scale of the risk
Smart systems and their hackability
“When we talk about internet changing its size from a metaphoric golf ball to the sun, we are talking about the number of available connections to the internet,” said Goodman. With IPv6, there are 78 octillion possible connections. That’s 78 billion billion billion, or enough space to give one trillion IP ad-
Let’s take security cameras, for example. Goodman says around 30% of the systems, particularly those of consumer grade, come out of the box with no passwords whatsoever. “So if anyone knows the right IP address or the right address to reach your camera, they can log in and see you at any time.
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MAY/JUNE 2016 - ECD [ELECTRICAL+COMMS+DATA] 13