Yet More Stupid Ideas in Consumer Electronics

Extremetech reports here on the new Bluetooth-enabled toaster announced at this week's Consumer Electronics Show.  The article is extremely funny but the product is all too real.

More on IoT-Driven DDOS Attacks

Extremetech writes here on the recent DDOS attacks on the Internet and possible long-term effects.

DDoS Attacks Against Dyn, IoT Implicated

Bruce Schneier reports here on current attacks against the DNS service provider Dyn.  These attacks have in turn slowed down a number of Internet sites.  IoT bots have been implicated as the avenue of attack.

More on IoT Security

Extremetech posts here a nice summary piece on the state of IoT security.

Georgia Tech Center for the Development and Application of Internet-of-Things Technologies

CDAIT, the Georgia Tech Center for the Development and Application of Internet-of-Things Technologies, is run by Alain Louchez.  Their web site posts a number of interesting items.  Here is one item on our research on long-term care for people with special needs.

IoT Symposium Keynote

Prof. Mani Srivastava of UCLA will deliver the keynote at the IoT Symposium.  His talk will be titled "Towards a Trustworthy Pervasive Sensing Substrate for the Internet of Things."

IoT Symposium at Embedded Systems Week

Jason Xue and I are organizing the IoT Symposium at Embedded Systems Week.  ESWeek is October 4-9 in Amsterdam; the IoT Symposium is on October 8-9.  The submission deadline for the symposium is June 29.  We hope you attend!  Even better, we hope you submit!   Here is the call for papers:

The ESWeek IoT Symposium is organized as a part of the Embedded Systems Week 2015. The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to revolutionize fields ranging from health care to manufacturing to personal living by connecting the Internet to physical things. Embedded computing and VLSI are central to the achievement of the IoT vision - advanced computation and communication must be delivered at extremely low energy levels and manufacturing costs. The IoT Symposium is devoted to research on advanced IoT systems.The IoT symposium will be a part of Embedded System week, and will provide a forum for researchers, from academia and industry, to present and discuss innovative ideas and solutions related to all facets of internet-of-things.
Topics of interest at IoT Symposium include but not limited to:
- VLSI Systems Track: ultra low energy systems, integrated sensors, 3D, platform architectures.
- Networking and Communications Track: Physical layer, protocols, network management.
- Algorithms and Infrastructures Track: Distributed and cloud computing, big data methods, heterogeneous sensors, sensor fusion, standards, design methodologies.
- Security and Privacy Track: Low-energy encryption, authentication, hardware security, privacy management.
- Applications Track: Industrial control, logistics, smart homes, smart cities, office management, smart vehicles and fleets.
- Ultra-low Energy System Track: Energy harvesting, hybrid energy systems, storage-less energy systems

More on IoT Security

Semiwiki.com has a number of interesting posts on the semiconductor industry and chip design.  Two recent posts address the intersection of chip design and the Internet-of-Things:

• Don Dingee described a technique for modifying one-time programmable keys.  He makes the very good point that a lot of devices whose data is identified with us may be sold or transferred, creating a potential security and privacy problem.
• Pawan Fangaria talks about the importance of MEMS sensors for IoT and discusses MEMS design techniques.

Internet of Things security

Proofpoint, a computer security company, has confirmed what we long suspected: Internet-of-things devices pose computer security threads.  Their article, which you can find here, describes how they found a variety of household Internet-connected devices were sending out malicious emails.  The offending devices included multimedia devices and "at least one refrigerator."

 The idea of refrigerators as sleeper agents or Skynet nodes may sound like a Saturday Night Live sketch, but this observation has some serious implications.  PC security, while far from perfect, is much better than it was 20 years ago.  IoT devices are at a primitive level, but unlike PCs, consumers often have no reason to worry about them.  Malware on PCs may be used to attack other computers, but everyday users understand the very real threat to their data that is posed by these programs.  As a result, consumers are willing to invest in computer security tools.  So long as malware on IoTs is used to attack other computers without seriously affecting the device, consumers are unlikely to care much that their refrigerator has become a zombie.  And the market for these devices is sufficiently cost-sensitive that manufacturers are unlikely to introduce strong security measures on their own.  Like so many things, it may take a disastrous event to wake people up to the problem.