Why We Might Just Need This Guy After All...

You’re walking through Best Buy one day, and one by one different products catch your eye, particularly the smart ones: TVs, and those iPhone-controlled home appliance systems, the latter being surprisingly inexpensive. “You mean that for under 50 bucks I can control my garage-door, thermostat, and lights with my smart phone?” you excitedly ask yourself.

It’s very appealing—who doesn’t want to have that kind of blithe control over the various systems of your home? And besides—how cool is that anyway!

However facile those devices seem, they come at a hefty price of transparency and security. The problem with these devices (whether smart TVs, smart phone-controlled home appliances, or any appliance connected to your device through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) is that they are now equipped with bidirectional networking interfaces, which exposes the internet to the appliance and the appliance to the internet. The result? A whole slew of security risks. As Peter Bright states in a Jan 9, 2014 article for ArsTechnica, that we should resist these new devices, “because the ‘internet of things’ stands a really good chance of turning into the ‘internet of unmaintained, insecure, and dangerously hackable things’." 

What we are seeing is what's called "the internet of things," or "IoT," namely where the internet literally connects things with other things, such as heart monitors to watches to cars to smart TVs and refrigerators. According to Gartner, an IT company out of Stamford, Connecticut, there will be 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by the year 2020. This level of complexity is something we have not seen before; and with those 26 billion devices being connected to human beings, the risks to our health, livelihood, personal security, and even life are appalling.

In a recent article in BetaBeat, reporting on Europol (the European Union's criminal intelligence agency) and its recent Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment, there are myriad ways in which, as things and humans are being ever-more connected, our security is becoming more precarious. The report states,

With more objects being connected to the Internet and the creation of new types of critical infrastructure, we can expect to see (more) targeted attacks on existing and emerging infrastructures, including new forms of blackmailing and extortion schemes (e.g. ransomware for smart cars or smart homes), data theft, physical injury and possible death, and new types of botnets.

The BetaBeat story cites a report by internet security firm IID that predicted that the first cyber-murder would take place by the end of 2014. They also envisage hackers "remotely burning down homes, infiltrating the electrical grids, and exploiting military weapons systems." 

Recently, on September 25th, 2014, there was a report in the Ottawa Citizen of "Bash Bug Sets off Internet Security Alarm Bells," claiming,

A newly discovered bug leaving everything from smart appliances and thermostats to Internet servers and even home routers vulnerable to hackers has been classified as “catastrophic” and is sparking a massive examination of computer systems across the Internet.

But how does this relate directly to smart appliances? 

In an article by Peter Edwards of the Toronto Star, Jan 22, 2014, Proofpoint, Inc., a corporation specializing in corporate security, reported that month that, “cybercriminals have targeted Internet-connected home devices, since they’re much easier to hack than home computers or tablets.” 

And, according to Proofpoint, Inc.’s study, 750,000 malicious email messages were sent out from more than 100,000 household gadgets, including a fridge, between December 23, 2013 and Jan. 6, 2014.”

According to Professor David Skillicorn of the Queen’s School of Computer Sciences, he would not trust a thermostat or garage door opener that can be turned on and off from a cellphone, for “there’s no simple way to make it [work] just for me, guaranteed.” Many of these smart appliances are running Windows or Android software, and can be used to send SPAM, but also denial-of-service attacks and all sorts of things that are opened up when a device is connected to the Internet. That makes all internet-connected home products like thermostats, microwaves, and even security cameras all security risks.

So, if you’re on that stroll through Best Buy, and are attracted to the latest smart TV, or in the throes of a simple and inexpensive way to connect your lights, thermostat, and garage door to your iPhone, think again. The security risks imposed on your home—and those, of course, around you—by that seemingly innocuous device may have a much greater cost than a meager 50 bucks. Not to mention that you are contributing to the growth of the Internet of Things, the complexity of which human beings will continuously grow subjugated.