Dubai: Is the public internet ready for the network of devices that are connected to the internet and that can be controlled remotely, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT)?
No, says Ihab Moawad, vice-president for Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa, Russia and CIS countries at Trend Micro.
“Infrastructure of the internet today is not the right platform and not properly equipped with right security measures as it is today to carry IoT equipment on top of it,” he said.
He said that the current protocol of moving from IPv4 (internet Protocol version four) to IPv6 offers challenges. Infrastructure is not ready and security is a failure. Many are still in IPv4 and IPv6 is not widely deployed.
“IoT will take off only when IPV6 is fully deployed because it provides the vast address space that is needed for when all those ‘things’ with individual mobile connectivity try to get online,” he said.
The current IP address standard is called IPv4 and ran out of its 4.3 billion addresses several years ago as more people and their devices connected to the internet. With everyday devices now needing to connect to the internet it fast exhausted the number of available addresses.
The main advantage of IPv6 over IPv4 is its larger address space. IPv6 consists of larger numbers and allows letters in the addressing system, IPv6 can theoretically hold 2128, or approximately 3.4×1038 IP addresses a truly incredible number.
“Until the quality, reliability, latency and security of the internet is not improved, there will be challenges for internet of things,” Moawad said.
After massive denial-of-service attacks in October, known as Mirai, against internet-infrastructure provider Dyn in the US caused its domain services to become unreachable and resulted in intermittent service outages for its clients.
There are a lot of developments that needs to be done today, he said, and added that the DDoS attack demonstrates the potential for significantly greater havoc from these new threats.
“Your kettles and fridges have to be managed from a uniform and standard place that has to be developed to carry the IoT protocols. It is just not about kettles and fridges. The next wave of IoT is in the health care sector. An attacker can attack and kill a heart patient through a pacemaker. It will become easy for hackers than before to steal data and privacy,” he said.
Right now, he said that manufacturers are building the device and placing security layer on top of it. This cannot continue. Manufactures need to develop products with “security and encryption” from the design phase itself.
The IoT is the coming wave and the biggest in the internet era. Right now, IoT manufactures are setting the devices without the right platform.
“The challenges are how the devices are going to interoperable. Devices from different operating systems are not able to talk to each other due to lack of interoperable protocol existing today.
There are companies working on IoT protocols but it will take at least five years from now for the interoperable and other issues for the IoT era to be solved,” he said.
The number of vendors on IoT platform is growing day by day and the battle of platforms to offer their own cloud-hosted offerings, including Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon, are likely to continue.
“The IoT promises enormous benefits to consumers and businesses over the coming years. But to enjoy the IoT fully, we will need to find effective ways to deal with the security risks that will ride along with them,” he said.
