Internet of Things. Yet Another Gloomy Post.

Technically, I work with Things, as in the Internet of Things.

As outlined in Everything as a Service many formerly ‘dumb’ products – such as heating systems – become part of service offerings. A vital component of the new services is the technical connection of the Thing in your home to that Big Cloud. It seems every energy-related system has got its own Internet Gateway now: Our photovoltaic generator has one, our control unit has one, and the successor of our heat pump would have one, too. If vendors don’t bundle their offerings soon, we’ll end up with substantial electricity costs for powering a lot of separate gateways.

Experts have warned since years that the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with security challenges. Many Things’ owners still keep default or blank passwords, but the most impressive threat is my opinion is not hacking individual systems: Easily hacked things can be hijacked to serve as zombie clients in a botnet and lauch a joint Distributed Denial of Service attack against a single target. Recently the blog of renowned security reporter Brian Krebs has been taken down, most likely as an act of revenge by DDoSers (Crime is now offered as a service as well.). The attack – a tsunami of more than 600 Gbps – was described as one of the largest the internet had seen so far. Hosting provider OVH was subject to a record-breaking Tbps attack – launched via captured … [cue: hacker movie cliché] … cameras and digital video recorders on the internet.

I am about the millionth blogger ‘reporting’ on this, nothing new here. But the social media news about the DDoS attacks collided with another social media micro outrage  in my mind – about seemingly unrelated IT news: HP had to deal with not-so-positive reporting about its latest printer firmware changes and related policies –  when printers started to refuse to work with third-party cartridges. This seems to be a legal issue or has been presented as such, and I am not interested in that aspect here. What I find interesting is the clash of requirements: After the DDoS attacks many commentators said IoT vendors should be held accountable. They should be forced to update their stuff. On the other hand, end users should remain owners of the IT gadgets they have bought, so the vendor has no right to inflict any policies on them and restrict the usage of devices.

I can relate to both arguments. One of my main motivations ‘in renewable energy’ or ‘in home automation’ is to make users powerful and knowledgable owners of their systems. On the other hand I have been ‘in security’ for a long time. And chasing firmware for IoT devices can be tough for end users.

It is a challenge to walk the tightrope really gracefully here: A printer may be traditionally considered an item we own whereas the internet router provided by the telco is theirs. So we can tinker with the printer’s inner workings as much as we want but we must not touch the router and let the telco do their firmware updates. But old-school devices are given more ‘intelligence’ and need to be connected to the internet to provide additional services – like that printer that allows to print from your smartphone easily (Yes, but only if you register it at the printer manufacturer’s website before.). In addition, our home is not really our castle anymore. Our computers aren’t protected by the telco’s router / firmware all the time, but we work in different networks or in public places. All the Things we carry with us, someday smart wearable technology, will check in to different wireless and mobile networks – so their security bugs should better be fixed in time.

If IoT vendors should be held accountable and update their gadgets, they have to be given the option to do so. But if the device’s host tinkers with it, firmware upgrades might stall. In order to protect themselves from legal persecution, vendors need to state in contracts that they are determined to push security updates and you cannot interfere with it. Security can never be enforced by technology only – for a device located at the end user’s premises.

It is horrible scenario – and I am not sure if I refer to hacking or to proliferation of even more bureaucracy and over-regulation which should protect us from hacking but will add more hurdles for would-be start-ups that dare to sell hardware.

Theoretically a vendor should be able to separate the security-relevant features from nice-to-have updates. For example, in a similar way, in smart meters the functions used for metering (subject to metering law) should be separated from ‘features’ – the latter being subject to remote updates while the former must not. Sources told me that this is not an easy thing to achieve, at least not as easy as presented in the meters’ marketing brochure.

If hardware security cannot be regulated, there might be more regulation of internet traffic. Internet Service Providers could be held accountable to remove compromised devices from their networks, for example after having noticed the end user several times. Or smaller ISPs might be cut off by upstream providers. Somewhere in the chain of service providers we will have to deal with more monitoring and regulation, and in one way or other the playful days of the earlier internet (romanticized with hindsight, maybe) are over.

When I saw Krebs’ site going offline, I wondered what small business should do in general: His site is now DDoS-protected by Google’s Project Shield, a service offered to independent journalists and activists after his former pro-bono host could not deal with the load without affecting paying clients. So one of the Siren Servers I commented on critically so often came to rescue! A small provider will not be able to deal with such attacks.

WordPress.com should be well-protected, I guess. I wonder if we will all end up hosting our websites at such major providers only, or ‘blog’ directly to Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn (now part of Microsoft) to be safe. I had advised against self-hosting WordPress myself: If you miss security updates you might jeopardize not only your website, but also others using the same shared web host. If you live on a platform like WordPress dot com or Google, you will complain from time to time about limited options or feature updates you don’t like – but you don’t have to care about security. I compare this to avoiding legal issues as an artisan selling hand-made items via Amazon or the like, in contrast to having to update your own shop’s business logic after every change in international tax law.

I have no conclusion to offer. Whenever I read news these days – on technology, energy, IT, anything in between, The Future in general – I feel reminded of this tension: Between being an independent neutral netizen and being plugged in to an inescapable matrix, maybe beneficial but Borg-like nonetheless.