Tuesday, June 14, 2016

IoT and Security

While new IoT devices are appearing everyday,  a lot of people are concerned about their security.  How easily can these things be hacked?  I know that's something that I worry about as we venture into processing data from various IoT sources.  As developers, we have to make security of the device and the data sent from the device a key requirement.

It seems like I find articles like this one about the Mitsubishi Outlander which was hacked via it's in-car Wi-Fi ability almost everyday.  When a company has to recommend this about it's product --

Mitsubishi is advising customers who own this Outlander to temporarily disable the car's WiFi and decouple the app from the car. The company is working on new firmware that will be pushed to the app.

 -- it's bad.

Here is a decent article about IoT security that has some sensible advice.

It starts with recognizing that IoT security must be a priority, and that security features must be built into IoT devices by default. The next evolution will be when we build a system to ship code patches to close vulnerabilities and resolve attacks remotely at scale to deployed devices.