On security challenges of the Internet of Things

I was asked by one of the leading security companies to come and talk with its technical leaders about the security challenges of the Internet of Things, which I believe is one of the major challenges in this area.  Here are my thoughts on my weekly column in RTInsights.

The Physical Web - by Google

Google recently revealed the "Physical Web" project.  This project is aimed at "interaction on demand" which will be a standard way that everybody will be able to consume data from devices connected to the Internet (AKA "Internet of Things") without the intervention of applications.   
This idea reminds of the idea of the grand challenge posed by the Event Processing Manifesto that was the result of the Dagstuhl seminar in 2010 and talked about "event fabric".     The "event fabric" challenge went further than get events on demand and also included processing event patterns on demand which I believe will be the next step to create access for everybody.  The ability to compose patterns on demand by everybody is a key to making this real-time data useful and complete the IoT revolution....  I am planned to give a talk related to this idea in early November in a workshop adjacent to the ACM Multimedia conference in Orlando... Will write more on this later...

PEW Research report on the Internet of Things in 2025

PEW Research center published this week a comprehensive report  entitled: "The Internet of Things will strive by 2025".   This report is based on a survey that 1600 responders participate in.

I have copied the Table of Contents of that report:

I am now working on a three hours tutorials on Internet of Everything that I plan to deliver in DEBS 2014 in Mumbai. 

Internet of Things - what's holding us back?

InformationWeek published an article this week by Chris Murphy entitled: "Internet Of Things: What's Holding Us Back".   In this article Murphy describes several reasons that hold us back from exploiting the potential of the IoT.  The reasons he mentions are:

1. The data is not good enough:  the claim is that the conception that all requested data is readily available is not consistent with reality, where data suffers from quality,  frequency and spatial coverage of the sensors, and data integration issues.
2. Networks aren't ubiquitous:   The product owners don't have control over the availability of networks
3. Integration is tougher than analysis:  The main problem is not to analyze the data, but to integrate all data needed for analysis
4. More sensor innovation needed: The stated areas of required innovation are - combine video sources which today are under-utilized; more-refined and more-affordable environmental sensors; software-defined sensor,a combination of multiple sensors plus computing power that sits out on a network and "calculates rather than measures."
5. Status quo security doesn't cut it.  Security systems for IoT should be radically different than those developed for traditional IP.

I agree that all of these contribute in one way or another to the difficulties around exploiting the potential of IoT.    Dealing with inexact or uncertain data is a major issue, a link to our tutorial on the topic can be obtained from this blog post.  What Murphy refers as "software defined sensor", is in fact, the ability to use multiple sensors and get sense out of it in real-time,  this is exactly what the event processing discipline produces, furthermore, our work on event modeling contributes to make it simpler. 

I am planned to deliver a tutorial on "Internet of Everything" in DEBS 2014 in Mumbai, where I'll discuss all these issues.  

More - later. 

Moving On

Next week I am moving on,  after 16.5 years in IBM, I have decided to move on and pursue a societal challenge, by accepting an offer to establish and manage a new applied research institute, whose temporary name is "Technological Empowerment Institute".  The empowerment aspect is aimed to empower both sectors and populations that require substantial enhancement of their capabilities to enjoy high technology.  

The societal aspect is twofold -- both the societal challenges and the location, it will be based in the periphery.   The question is whether it has any relation to my past work on event processing?  the answer is definitely yes,  I view the Internet of Things as a major vehicle for achieving many of the challenges, and the work I was recently involved in, making event processing accessible to larger audiences as one of the key ares.  The institute will include multi-disciplinary activities, and implementation projects to meet the challenges.  It is initiated by YVC,  a relatively young but ambitious  academic institute, and I'll report to the president of YVC.   However, it will include activities and affiliate members that will span multiple sites and researchers.

I'll provide more details about it,  in fact, this Blog will from now on reflect my experience in trying to establish and operate this institute (but I'll not change its name as I am always think in events).  

Next week I'll wrap up my presence in IBM (this week I packed my office, and unpacked in the new one -- which had a toll on my aching back), and I'll summarize my tenure there.    I am taking an exciting but very challenging task,  and will issue call for people  to be involved in various capacities. 

58 sensor applications

I came across a site that lists "top 50 sensor applications for the smarter world".  It actually list 58 applications partitioned to the following areas::  smart cities, smart environment, smart water, smart metering, security & emergencies, retail, logistics, industrial control, smart agriculture, smart animal farming, domestic & home automation, and eHealth.  

I worth digging into the different areas to check the potential applications, and the role of event processing in each of them. 

Machine to machine protocol from NY Times

The "Internet of Things" where any thing is connected to the network, is one of the most influential trends today.  Cisco in its vision about the "Internet of Everything" based on the "Internet of Things"  predicts that the economical impact of the "Internet of Everything"  is  14.4 Trillion Dollars.   There is a lot of work about the infrastructure, one of it is MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), a protocol used to support Machine-to-Machine communication.    The NY times had  recent article within its blogs on MQTT as an open standard.  In the article there is a link to a talk by my IBM colleague Andy Stanford-Clark.  
One of the mentioned applications occur in the automobile industry, of putting sensors in cars, e.g. on the car battery.

Andy is working on these topics for a long time,  in fact the chapter in our EPIA book that deals with event consumers described some of Andy's application and the ambient orb's picture appears in the book was  taken at Andy's office.  Andy has famous talks and video clips on his house where he uses MQTT to control the power.  A recent video clip that Andy posted entitled "the house that twitters" demonstrates the idea.  There are other presentations and video clips on this topic over the years. 

Internet of Things will create most of the world's events of the future, and will be a major factor in making the world event-driven.    I'll write soon about the synergy between the old world and the new world. 

More on Internet of Things and event processing for personal systems

This illustration is taken from a recent Blog posting by Phil Windley, the CTO of Kynetx, whom I met in DEBS'11.   Phil writes about IoT as a source of personal event processing, and about "personal event bus", in which any consumer can subscribe to events and process them individually.


I have provided some background about IoT recently and about its potential to be game changer;  the personal systems is an interesting aspect.   Event processing models and systems of the first generation have been developed in mind of business oriented systems. However, I have stated before that I see the big potential of event processing outside the traditional corporate IT, and provided robotics and biological computing as some areas of interest.  Consumer applications is definitely an area with a lot of potential, however the challenges to do it is beyond collecting and subscribing to events, it is the ability to compose event processing application by consumers, which requires progress in the abstraction level of composing such applications.  This is definitely and avenue to pursue. 

On the Internet of Things (IoT)

Over the years I faced a lot of skeptic people, for the entire idea of event processing.     In the early days when I explained people what event processing is,  one of the common reactions was:  this is not really practical,  you would never be able to get hold of the events you need for this application.    This has some truth in it,  the producer and consumer parts of event processing are often the most time and cost consuming parts of an event processing systems,  However, the availability of events increase with time, since many of the current trends, like the IBM smarter planet, are based on the assumption that events of many types and many sources are available.    The picture above the the quasi-logo of the "Internet of Things",  a phrase I always thought as somewhat funny.  The idea is that any "thing" - car, building, cell phone emits events to an Internet scale infrastructure - which gained the name IoT.   There is now a lot of work around IoT,  
Research and Markets recently issued a report about IoT, called it a potential game changer.   The report also mentions event processing as one of the ingredients of IoT.  Here - the relationships comes from both directions,  IoT infrastructure is a source of many events that can be used of many applications with event processing functionality as part of them.  The IoT infrastructure itself requires event processing for filtering, transforming, and reducing the number of events by reporting derived events based on trends, or situations of interest.  We are now looking of some potential use cases for our proactive computing project, and the relations to IoT is clear.  While IoT typically works on the producer (sensor) side, there is also a consumer (actuator) side to it, I'll write more about sensor and actuators examples later.