The Internet of Risky Things

Preface

It’s autumn 2016. As this book is getting ready to go to press, news sources (both computing and mainstream) start reporting a massive distributed denial of service attack against Dyn’s internet infrastructure—launched from compromised devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT). A security colleague jokingly asks me whether I arranged the attack as a promotion for this book. A humanities colleague asks me why there are computers inside baby monitors. A science reporter asks what I think—and sadly, I fear this is just the beginning. In autumn 2016, the smart things were only attacking traditional Internet of Computers (IoC) things, with consequences confined to computing. We may have a future where IoT and IoC things alike attack the IoT, with consequences in whatever real-world infrastructure the IoT things augment.

The Internet of Risky Things grew out of a “Sophomore Summer” course I developed and taught at Dartmouth and draws on my lifetime of experience in the interaction of security and information technology and society (including healthcare, investment banking, and 10 years working on cybersecurity in the smart grid—and even e-government at the dawn of the web). This book implicitly assumes a general college education, familiarity with the internet as a user, and the context of citizenship in the world; however, I also see the book being of value to audiences with specialties in computer science, management, research, and education.

The coming IoT distributes computational devices massively in almost any axis imaginable and connects them intimately to previously noncyber aspects of human life. Analysts predict that by 2020 we will have over 25 billion networked devices embedded throughout our homes, clothing, factories, cities, vehicles, buildings, and bodies. As a result, everyone in the developed world will be using the IoT. Anyone who drives or rides in a car will be sharing the road with self-driving cars and depending on smart infrastructure governing the control of traffic lights and the storage and movement of gasoline. Anyone who connects something to the electric grid will be using the IoT. Anyone in a hospital, or buying a new appliance, or in a new commercial house or building will be using it.

In a nutshell: any thinking citizen who plans to still be around in 10 years should be worrying about these issues now.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sergey Bratus, John Erickson, Ross Koppel, Bill Nisen, and the students in the Dartmouth Trust Lab for their helpful discussion, and my colleagues and partners in the DOE/NSF/HHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid and Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium projects for giving me a chance to learn much about and help a little with one of the world’s largest cyber-physical systems.

Thanks also to Jamie Coughlin, Katharina Daub, and Michael Wooten for their help in setting up the “Risks of the Internet of Things” living/learning course—and to the students in the course for making it all happen. And to Gretchen, for her patience and support.