IoT for Dummies
So what is Internet anyway?
In a nutshell internet is a network of computers mostly connected by cables. Think of your phone even if it’s connected to the internet through a cable, it very quickly accesses the rest of the network through a cable. Whether you are using 4G/5G or local WiFi the wireless part of the communication is only between the phone and the cell tower or the modem/router. After that you are surfing a network of cables!
And here is a map!
To simplify things all the white dots represents big nodes in the network with loads of data centers and the colorful lines represent the actual cables (mostly big underwater monsters!).
So that’s the internet! You have a network of cables connecting client side computers and fetching data on servers to display that information on a screen…
But nowadays computer can do a lot more and are a lot more connected than they once were…
Computers are full of sensors!
Indeed that’s what makes all the difference between the good old Internet and the Internet Of Things. Let’s take the example of a smartphone. See what we are doing here!? We are calling our mobile phones Smart… And why is that? Because, for starters, now they have a full blown computer inside of them. And more importantly they have sensors connect to it which interact with the outside world!
This great article by Gizmodo list the main ones you currently find in your average smartphone. And the list is long… Accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, GPS, proximity sensor to name a few. How do you think you you’ve been playing that cool car game on your smartphone? You turn your phone left or right and so does the car on the screen. Wow, Thanks gyroscope! And since you are playing this game online with other players around the world you are experimenting the IoT in all its glory!
And the IoT is everywhere now. It’s probably in your house. Smart light bulbs will dim the light according to the surrounding light, the sprinklers will automatically water your garden if the humidity in the ground drops below a certain level and you will receive a notification on your smartwatch. Your fridge and even your barbecue are in on it too! Possibilities are endless… And the promise of a better life has never been greater!
This Youtube video sums it up quite well
But with great power comes great responsibilities…
If IoT is bound to make our life easier and our businesses more productive it’s not without its challenges. Especially from a security stand point as exemplified by this funny yet quite scary TED Talk from Ken Monro a white hat hacker specialized in testing IoT security. There are a lot of concerns with IoT from the expansion of attack surfaces (your network as lot more entry points) to the actual security of those entry points. Because most of IoT device by definition grant access to your network via WiFi or Bluethooth they need to be secure. The problem is that some of those devices can be cheap toys or gadgets that don’t have proper passwords and can be easily hacked.
Even expensive professional tools can present great security threats as show by the Mirai Botnet crisis of 2016 when smart security cameras brought down a large part of the U.S East Cost internet down for more than 2 hours… A botnet is a collection of internet-connected computers controlled by a remote party who has hacked the system. The hacker as a de-facto access to a super-computer comprised of all the computational power of all the devices in the network. In this case thousands of smart security cameras were hacked by the Mirai walware and eventually took websites like Twitter and Spotify down…
Conclusion
IoT might is an amazing technology with amazing possible implementations but it underlines more than ever the frailty of cyber security. As technology gets more complex security measures need to progress accordingly. At this point in time there is a massive unbalance. The cyber security threat has never been this great and networks this accessible. Therefore companies bringing new IoT devices to market need to bump up their security so we can all benefit from a more connected world and not suffer from it…
