The Future of IoT Security

With the onset of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, an enormous number of devices are now accessible via the Internet and are therefore vulnerable to cyberattack. Society is still adjusting to the fact that devices that people used to trust can now betray them in unexpected ways. Your television may expose your conversations, your printer may divulge your documents, and your fitness monitor may reveal your health information. All of these attacks become possible in the presence of IoT devices which are not designed with security in mind. System designers are trained to evaluate system design options in terms of their impact on system characteristics such as power, performance, and time-to-market, but security is a property which is less well understood. Designers of IoT devices need to have the ability to consider, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how design alternatives affect the security of the system. To do that, designers must understand the essential aspects of common cyberattacks. The nature of cyberattacks is broad and ever-changing as attackers alter their techniques over time. However, there are a number of attack themes which are fundamental to many cyberattacks and change only infrequently. Designers need to understand these important attack themes and how to defend against them. A good example is a vulnerability to a buffer overflow attack which is usually a result of weak coding practices, such as neglecting to verify that the amount of data written into a buffer is not greater than the size of the buffer. Defense against buffer overflow can likely be achieved through static code analysis and proper testing techniques, without the need to include any security components in the IoT device. Another attack against IoT devices is a battery draining attack which consumes power by exploiting features of the network communication protocol being used by the device. Different protocols, and their interface controllers, have different degrees of vulne