Title: Editorial: Necessary technology

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 09 November 2016 16:56:14 +00:00 or Wed, 09 November 2016 16:56:14 +00:00

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here is much ado in the media at the moment about the Internet of Things. Specifically it’s been precipitated by the recent occurrence of ‘the Internet is broken’, wherein several high-traffic and high-profile Internet presences were unavailable – to pretty much everyone in Europe and North America. The reason for the outage was that key DNS servers run by Dyn were suffering a Denial of Service attack – since reported to have been the largest on record. My understanding from several sources is that Dyn in particular coped with the attacks, and the outages, very well under the circumstances, but that’s not really what I’m writing about. It seems that much of the traffic that caused the problems was sourced from, or routed through, the so-called IoT – the Internet of Things. Web-cams, baby monitors, tooth-brushes, printers, refrigerators, who knows what else.

Some devices require access to the Internet in order to be useful – for example, if you have a broadband router, it would not be very useful without access to the Internet. The problem, of course, is that without sufficient security, access to the Internet means access from the Internet, too. Some devices, on the other hand, do not require access to the Internet but have it because it’s become fashionable. I’ve already mentioned some such devices. It’s a problem because these devices are extremely resource-restricted (you can’t get much processing power onto a toothbrush), and there simply isn’t space for the extra security needed to make them resilient. I do, however, question the necessity of their connectedness. I’ve alluded (cynically, yes) to the marketability of being an on-line device, and it’s a bandwagon that’s being overwhelmed by a huge variety of seemingly innocuous devices which, frankly, aren’t up to the job of doing it securely. A lack of security in one device has the potential to put entire residential networks at risk, with the subsequent fall-out in identity theft, online fraud and so on.

Is there something that the software community at large can do to help? And how does one change the default password on a toothbrush, anyway?

It will come as no surprise to anyone that this is a topic to which I will return...

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