The Thing About The Internet of Things
Everyday there seems to be a brand new “smart” device that everyone is talking about. There are smart TVs, smart washers, even smart refrigerators that can order groceries for you. We live in a wild time where it seems like we can control our entire house from our phones, but how exactly does this happen?
The internet of things (IoT) defines objects that are able to “talk” to each other and exchange data. In this article, we will look into the wonderfully connected world of IoT devices as well as the potential privacy and security concerns that tie in with these devices.
The official definition of IoT (or at least according to the Internet of Things Agenda) is “a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.” As simple as this definition is, it doesn’t exactly captures how revolutionary IoT devices are. The creation of IoT changed our understanding of what can be connected to the internet, and this idea is greatly illustrated in the story of the first IoT device.
In the 1980s, a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University named David Nichols faced a constant problem of walking all the way to the school’s vending machine just to find out that the machine was either empty or full of room temperature Coke. This gave him the idea to come up with a way to track the amount of soda in the machine as well as the temperature of the sodas.
Whenever a soda column was empty within the machine, a indicator light would go on. With this said, Nichols and a few of his buddies installed a board into the vending machine that kept tabs on whenever the indicator lights flashed on. This board was connected to the computer science department’s main computer which was connected to the ARPANET, a precursor to today’s internet. A program that was written by Nichols’ friend Mike Kazar checked the status of each soda column within the machine a few times per second. The program also allowed anyone who was on a computer that was connected to the ARPANET to access information on the machine. Thus, the first machine that wasn’t a traditional computer was connected to the internet, and while Nichols and his friends didn’t think their experiment was particularly groundbreaking, they opened a Pandora’s box of opportunities.
Today’s IoT devices are far more sophisticated than Nichols’ vending machine. However, they are still not as sophisticated as an actual computer, and that is what makes them so valuable for tracking data. Unlike an actual computer, IoT devices don’t necessarily have to be connected to the internet to send data. They can be connected to some type of controller or base station using radio frequency ID (RFID) tags, near field communication, or Bluetooth. The controller or base station is then connected to the internet which then sends the data to your other devices. For example, some packages have a RFID sticker that have sensors that track the temperature of the package as well as any shock that it might have experienced when being handled. These stickers send the data they collect via radio waves to a receiver that decodes these waves into the needed data.
Another connivence that certain IoT devices have is that they consume a lot less power than an actual computer. Going back to the RFID sticker example, there are two types of stickers: passive stickers, which means it has some type of unique ID that can be scanned to access its data; and active stickers, which are a little more advance than passive stickers with more advanced chips and tiny batteries that can transmit data to further distances. The batteries in these active stickers can last up to a year, a considerably long time when compared to the battery of other small devices.
VTech, a popular electronic toys company, released a number of tablets geared towards young children that teaches them educational lessons using educational Android apps and a learning library. A cool feature in these tablets was that the child using the tablet can take pictures on it using the built in camera. However, in 2016, a security breach on VTech databases gave access to photos and chat logs on the accounts of about 6.3 million children. Soon, parents were urged to boycott VTech toys in an effort to protect their children from future hacks.
The tale of the VTech tablets is just one example of what can go wrong when using IoT devices. IoT devices are constantly sending data through the internet, and unfortunately that means that all of that data is vulnerable to getting hacked as well as the device itself. At 2016’s DEF CON, a hacker convention that takes place every year, there was an entire presentation on how easy it was to hack into a Bluetooth Low Energy lock. They showed how to hack into a variety of smart lock brands such as Quicklock, iBlulock, and Plantraco, just to name a few. With this said, using these locks can potentially leave your house vulnerable to break-ins if the robber is also a hacker.
You can even get hacked through the most bizarre appliances thanks to IoT. There is a great episode of Mr.Robot where a hacker group takes over an entire luxury home through hacking the smart devices that were connected within the house. While that is just a small scene in a show, it does show a vulnerability that comes with becoming dependent on IoT devices. In 2015, it was revealed that the users of Samsung refrigerators were vulnerable to getting their Google log-in credentials stolen since the refrigerator is connected to a variety of apps including Google Calendar. Just comes to show that with being connected to the internet, there is always a security risk.
With all of this said, we shouldn’t let the bad outweigh the good. IoT devices can definitely make our lives easier and more efficient. We just need to be very careful with the type of data we are recording and sending and take any necessary countermeasures to make sure our data remains protected.
The Thing About The Internet of Things
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