Steven Max Patterson
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Steven Max Patterson
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This Linux tool could improve the security of IoT devices
The first rule of building a secure and feature-rich ecosystem is software management — push and pull software updates and software discovery through an app store mechanism from a trusted source.In the go-to-market IoT race, though, that often doesn’t happen. Many Internet of Things (IoT) product developers have ignored the traumatic early history of Microsoft Windows, Android and web platforms, and expoits of IoT devices — because software updates have not been designed in — are regularly reported.+ Also on Network World: How to improve IoT security + Those earlier platforms have been hardened, updates have been automated, and the app discovery and installation have been made trustworthy. IoT developers need to follow their lead. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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This Linux tool could improve the security of IoT devices
The first rule of building a secure and feature-rich ecosystem is software management — push and pull software updates and software discovery through an app store mechanism from a trusted source.In the go-to-market IoT race, though, that often doesn’t happen. Many Internet of Things (IoT) product developers have ignored the traumatic early history of Microsoft Windows, Android and web platforms, and expoits of IoT devices — because software updates have not been designed in — are regularly reported.+ Also on Network World: How to improve IoT security + Those earlier platforms have been hardened, updates have been automated, and the app discovery and installation have been made trustworthy. IoT developers need to follow their lead. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to improve IoT security
The tsunami-sized trend to add intelligence with sensors and actuators and to connect devices, equipment and appliances to the internet poses safety, security and privacy risks.Proof comes from a recent meta-study titled The Internet of Hackable Things (pdf) from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, Denmark; Orebro University, Sweden; and Innopolis University, Russian Federation—compiled from industry and academic research reports—that finds smart devices used in healthcare and smart homes and buildings pose daunting risks.The authors quantify the risks of Internet of Things (IoT) devices:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to improve IoT security
The tsunami-sized trend to add intelligence with sensors and actuators and to connect devices, equipment and appliances to the internet poses safety, security and privacy risks.Proof comes from a recent meta-study titled The Internet of Hackable Things (pdf) from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, Denmark; Orebro University, Sweden; and Innopolis University, Russian Federation—compiled from industry and academic research reports—that finds smart devices used in healthcare and smart homes and buildings pose daunting risks.The authors quantify the risks of Internet of Things (IoT) devices:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to improve IoT security
The tsunami-sized trend to add intelligence with sensors and actuators and to connect devices, equipment and appliances to the internet poses safety, security and privacy risks.Proof comes from a recent meta-study titled The Internet of Hackable Things (pdf) from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, Denmark; Orebro University, Sweden; and Innopolis University, Russian Federation—compiled from industry and academic research reports—that finds smart devices used in healthcare and smart homes and buildings pose daunting risks.The authors quantify the risks of Internet of Things (IoT) devices:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IoT hype cycle antidote: Sitting with the engineers
Google’s former HR chief, Jonathan Rosenberg recounts in his book How Google Works a story about CEO Larry Page’s response to an MBA employee’s PowerPoint product plan. Page told the MBA, “Go sit with the engineers.”Page’s point: An effective new product plan can be created only if the engineering details are understood.Along this line of thinking, I spoke with Joe Biron, Internet of Things CTO at PTC, because the company has staked its future on IoT, and Biron has a decade of IoT engineering experience. PTC’s mature businesses, mechanical design, and product lifecycle management are closely related to the company’s industrial IoT business, where the company is focused for growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The IoT needs simulation to grow
Without simulation, complex systems would fail. Satellites would not reach an accurate orbit, semiconductor circuits would not function, and bridges would not carry the load. Businesses and governments would not invest in these projects without robust simulation software. And without a simulation proving value and functionality, IoT networks of hundreds of thousands or millions of inexpensive devices adding up to large capital investments will not be built.Researchers from the University of Bologna published an analysis of IoT simulation and a smart cities vehicular transportation system case study (pdf). They recommend a networked simulation of orchestrated simulators that model specific IoT features that fit the diversity of IoT devices and use cases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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LoRaWAN key to building full-stack production IoT networks
Outside of the consumer market, real examples of the Internet of Things (IoT) often disappoint because in the end, they are limited by one or more of the IoT’s constraints: tens of billions of devices, cheap to acquire, cheap to deploy, security and ubiquitous connections.I spoke with Dave Kjendal, Senet’s vice president of engineering and CTO, because he has built products and networks that meet these constraints. It was insightful because Senet has produced products using the entire IoT stack. Senet’s evolution began in 2009 with low-cost fuel oil tank sensors communicating over the unlicensed airwaves to optimize delivery routes. The company now operates a general purpose LoRaWAN IoT network that covers one-fortieth of the United States. LoRaWAN is an implementation of low-power, wide-area networks designed to transmit small messages at a frequency of about one an hour. It serves about 55 percent of IoT WAN connectivity. It is a different technical approach than what the mobile carriers promise with 3GPP, which is yet to be standardized.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Bluetooth Mesh networks: Is a standards body right for IoT innovation?
Earlier this week, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standards have been extended to include mesh network features. It is clear that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the intended market. The SIG says: Bluetooth Mesh is “ideally suited for building automation, sensor networks and other IoT solutions where tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices need to reliably and securely communicate with one another.” Mesh networks are not new. It is a network topology in which each node relays data for the network. All mesh nodes cooperate in the distribution of data in the network. The IoT-purpose-built Zigbee—a low-power, low-bandwidth ad hoc network—is a mesh network. Dating to 2002, Aruba Networks was founded to build Wi-Fi mesh networks. In 2014, student protesters in Hong Kong used mobile app FireChat to turn the crowd’s smartphones into a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mesh network so authorities could not interrupt protester’s coordinating conversations by blocking 3G and 4G network access. Bluetooth Mesh has some very desirable features:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Bluetooth Mesh networks: Is a standards body right for IoT innovation?
Earlier this week, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standards have been extended to include mesh network features. It is clear that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the intended market. The SIG says: Bluetooth Mesh is “ideally suited for building automation, sensor networks and other IoT solutions where tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices need to reliably and securely communicate with one another.” Mesh networks are not new. It is a network topology in which each node relays data for the network. All mesh nodes cooperate in the distribution of data in the network. The IoT-purpose-built Zigbee—a low-power, low-bandwidth ad hoc network—is a mesh network. Dating to 2002, Aruba Networks was founded to build Wi-Fi mesh networks. In 2014, student protesters in Hong Kong used mobile app FireChat to turn the crowd’s smartphones into a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mesh network so authorities could not interrupt protester’s coordinating conversations by blocking 3G and 4G network access. Bluetooth Mesh has some very desirable features:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Will IoT party like 1999?
After I read Brian Bailey’s IoT semiconductor design article, IoT Myth Busting, I thought of Prince’s song 1999, in particular, the line: “So tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine.” Without a lot of irrational exuberance, we won’t see IoT edge and fog networks soon Most IoT applications are prototypes and proof of concepts (PoC) designed to justify enterprise budget increases and follow-on venture investment rounds. Unless we return to and party like it is 1999 when telecoms over-invested in capacity ahead of demand, the telecom carriers are not going to build the new fog and edge networks that IoT needs to grow ahead of demand. At this stage, we would have to see a return of the irrational exuberance, a term coined by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, used to describe the over investment and over valuation during the dot-com bubble.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Will IoT party like 1999?
After I read Brian Bailey’s IoT semiconductor design article, IoT Myth Busting, I thought of Prince’s song 1999, in particular, the line: “So tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine.” Without a lot of irrational exuberance, we won’t see IoT edge and fog networks soon Most IoT applications are prototypes and proof of concepts (PoC) designed to justify enterprise budget increases and follow-on venture investment rounds. Unless we return to and party like it is 1999 when telecoms over-invested in capacity ahead of demand, the telecom carriers are not going to build the new fog and edge networks that IoT needs to grow ahead of demand. At this stage, we would have to see a return of the irrational exuberance, a term coined by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, used to describe the over investment and over valuation during the dot-com bubble.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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MIT IoT and wearable project foretells the future of industrial safety
The IoT in the commercial sector might better be called the Internet of Prototypes, the IoP.Few of the components for building the ubiquitous IoT that the future holds are available today. The best way to envision the future is by prototyping. Prototypes of mission-critical or high-ROI applications will tease money out of research budgets to build them. All the prototypes will lead to a greater understanding, and when the cost of the problem matches the development investment the prototypes will become products. With cost reduction and standardization, products could become generalized extensible platforms.+ Also on Network World: How industrial IoT is making steel production smarter + MIT built a fitting prototype that could, with further development, scale into a platform. A multidisciplinary team from the MIT Design Lab led by MIT Media Lab researcher Guillermo Bernal won best research paper at the Petra Conference last month for the team’s work applying IoT and wearables to industrial safety. The sophisticated and purpose-built prototype at the center of the research makes the paper “Safety++. Designing IoT and Wearable Systems for Industrial Safety through a User-Centered Design Approach” extremely tangible and predictive about how the IoT will unfold.To Continue reading
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MIT IoT and wearable project foretells the future of industrial safety
The IoT in the commercial sector might better be called the Internet of Prototypes, the IoP.Few of the components for building the ubiquitous IoT that the future holds are available today. The best way to envision the future is by prototyping. Prototypes of mission-critical or high-ROI applications will tease money out of research budgets to build them. All the prototypes will lead to a greater understanding, and when the cost of the problem matches the development investment the prototypes will become products. With cost reduction and standardization, products could become generalized extensible platforms.+ Also on Network World: How industrial IoT is making steel production smarter + MIT built a fitting prototype that could, with further development, scale into a platform. A multidisciplinary team from the MIT Design Lab led by MIT Media Lab researcher Guillermo Bernal won best research paper at the Petra Conference last month for the team’s work applying IoT and wearables to industrial safety. The sophisticated and purpose-built prototype at the center of the research makes the paper “Safety++. Designing IoT and Wearable Systems for Industrial Safety through a User-Centered Design Approach” extremely tangible and predictive about how the IoT will unfold.To Continue reading
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Searching for ground truth in IoT
I’ve been reading and writing daily about the Internet of Things (IoT) for about a month, and I have not found ground truth. I’m not new to the field, but now focused on IoT I am trying to find a relative measure of the importance of IoT developments.One of the definitions of ground truth in the Oxford Dictionary is: “Information obtained by direct observation of a real system, as opposed to a model or simulation; a set of data that is considered to be accurate and reliable, and is used to calibrate a model, algorithm, procedure, etc.” Calibrating the development of the IoT with ground truths that match the 20 billion to 50 billion forecasted devices requires a departure into the leap-of-faith lane. This is not pessimism, but a lack of published information that probably does not exist outside of research papers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Creating a wireless smart infrastructure: 4 expert recommendations
The mobile internet was a simpler infrastructure to design than the one that will be needed for the smart city, smart grid, smart health and smart transportation. Smartphones are homogeneous with relatively powerful processors and batteries driving transmission and reception. Designed to bring the internet to smartphones, 3G and 4G networks could be simpler. But IoT devices will span a range of heteroneous designs.The range of heterogeneity of the IoT is defined today by autonomous vehicles, which have thousands of sensors powered by high-capacity batteries that frequently communicate at high speed and low latency to simple sensors. Those sensors are powered by ambient power sources, sending a few infrequent bytes to communicate state (on/off, temperature, vibration amplitude and phase, etc.).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The inextricable link between IoT and machine learning
I met with a team of Microsoft AI researchers recently to discuss original adaptations of Resnet 50, a version of the convolutional network Microsoft used to win the Imagenet 2015 image recognition competition. The discussion about the scientists work caused me to reconsider the inextricable link between IoT and machine learning.Control loops are a fundamental principal of the internet of things (IoT.) If then, then that (ITTT) has a long history in conditionally controlling things dating to the invention of the electric relay in the 1830s. Over time, single relays were combined into state machines, and later, relays became transistors. During the glamorous growth of computers in IT, consumer and mobile sectors, less glamorous ITTT computers have been applied to many use cases such as controlling machines in factories and performing lab experiments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Fog computing may be IoT’s computational model
Fog computing and fog networking could fill the latency and range gap in the internet of things (IoT.) For the last couple of years, researchers have been reporting on developments in fog’s role in completing IoT’s ubiquitous connectivity. It is similar to cloud computing architectures but it brings the cloud to the edge to meet the different demands of IoT.The underlying concept is the cloud for some real-time IoT services could be too slow because the quality of service (QoS) specifications for the IoT application exceeds the cloud’s QoS. The solution is to move the cloud out into the network.RELATED: IoT catches on in New England fishing town Low latency and QoS is important in IoT use cases like self-driving vehicles and controlling robots and other control applications that require minimum latency to synchronize, supervise, control and initiate machine actions. Range is important when connecting devices over long distances where hubs and gateways are not locally available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Network engineering is key to meeting IoT expectations
The devil is in the details – best describes IoT. Computing will vanish says Walt Mossberg. And the public and data scientists gush with optimism at the thought of 20 billion to 50 billion connected IoT devices emitting an endless stream of data.Getting the billions of devices connected will be no small task. The thought of all the IoT applications of all that data is nothing less than seductive. Cities will self-regulate motor vehicle and public transportation saving commuters hours of travel time. Sensors will alert us and doctors when mom is not keeping to her pharmaceutical regimen.And, all these IoT devices will give context to people’s daily lives. Lights dimming or illuminating to match our mood or actions, refrigerators will warn that we have either eaten too much or not exercised enough before opening the door. Our designer glasses with integrated Microsoft Hololens technology will project the most salient context of the moment at that location.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Consumer IoT could outpace industrial IoT
Both Gartner and Tech Insider agree, the Internet of Things (IoT) will be a major tech category, predicting 20.4 billion units and 23.9 billion devices, respectively, by 2020.They disagree, however, about where those devices will go. Gartner says two-thirds of the devices will land in consumer applications. Tech Insider says over three-fourths will land in government and business applications.+ Also on Network World: 5 things to think about for industrial IoT readiness + Why is there such a big difference in forecasts? Which forecaster’s crystal ball is less occluded? Gartner’s forecasts depend on more stable, smaller IoT consumer islands, while Tech Insider’s forecasts depend on large clouds often built on evolving technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here