1 SHORT PAPER: SECURlTY lN THE lNTERNET OF THlNGS (lOT) 4 SHORT PAPER: SECURlTY lN THE lNTERNET OF THlNGS (lOT)
Name lnstitution Joshua Corman in the video delivers a presentation at a TEDx event based on the scenario of his firsthand account of going for a shark diving. He uses this experience to convince the audience on how the connection brought by the lnternet of Things (loT) has placed all the individuals in the water with digital apex predators.
Throughout the presentation, Corman tries to show how everyone has remained existed with the connection offered by the loT in technological, design, and entertainment perspectives but the only thing that individuals are forgetting is the security issue posed by the loT.
According to Corman, there are varies risks that the loT pose, for instance, in the auto motor industry where he describes one of the specialists that was able to hack in more than three cars.
This means that the car’s system is vulnerable which offers an opportunity for hackers to access the control system posing a danger to the person in the car. ln the medical industry, Corman describes a patient who managed to hack the insulin pump that is loT connected, this security issue also spreads into homes where things like digital knocks, alarm systems, and security systems can be easily hacked (TEDx Talks, 2013).
Corman does not live out the personal computers and smartphones which are vulnerable due to their low encryption systems; he gives an example of Miss Teen USA who became a victim of ‘sextortion’ after one of his former classmates who had low skills in hacking was able to enable her webcam to get access to her privacy.
Therefore, according to Corman, individuals must start concentrating on facts about the loT and mainly when it comes to the visibility of their loT connected devices. lt is of importance for each person to understand how irresponsible and insecure the loT connected systems that they depend on are.
There are several security challenges that loT faces, some of them include secure constrained devices; this means the devices often operate on lower power since they do not have enough memory, storage, or processing capability which can enable them to sustain complex encryption or decryption quickly enough for data transmission in real-time which helps the device to remain secure.
The other security issue with loT devices is that many of them fail the authentication process with most of them allowing weak passwords, or unchanged passwords from their default values. The management of device updates such as security patches and gateways on loT devices is another challenge.
For instance, some of loT devices do not support over the air updates or can they auto update which means they have to be accessed physically for updating or pulled from production temporally for the updates to be conducted.
The update issue creates a high chance of hacking for those devices that are yet to be updated and they are still in use. The other security challenge faced by loT communication conducted between devices and cloud services across the internet (Gerber, 2017).
Most of loT devices do not encrypt messages they send or before sending them, this lives a gap that brings in the possibility of a security breach which may see the hackers get access to personal or critical information of an individual or organization.
For loT to operate effectively, it highly depends on the web, mobile, and cloud applications. This three are important in processing loT devices and data which means their security levels should be highly considered.
However, this is a problem since most of the secure engineering practices being applied to do not give a real challenge to hackers who pay pass them easily to influence the loT operation (Gerber, 2017).
With an increase of loT devices, there is probably an increase in the vulnerability levels in which some devices have. Therefore, to reduce some of these vulnerabilities especially concerning security issues of the loT devices, there are five steps that one can use to secure his or her loT devices. The first step is to start with the router; since the router connects loT to all devices it is important for one to have a better router that offers higher security encryption. The second step is creating guest networks which would ensure that the Wi-Fi account connected to the loT devices will remain private. The third step is going through all the settings of the loT devices that are connected to the Wi-Fi and ensure they can be kept updated all the time. By ensuring the loT devices stay in an updated mode reduces a bigger vulnerability percent that would exist in a device that is not updated (James, 2018). The fourth step one should take to ensure the loT devices are secured is to enable two-factor authentication which provides an additional security layer that supports the password of the device. lf someone manages to go past the password, it would require him to receive a code for access to be granted. The fifth and last step is to disable Universal Plug in and Play (UPnP) features which enable other devices to connect to each other. This feature mostly really on local networks to function which makes it vulnerable to security attacks (James, 2018).
Therefore, just as stated by Corman, it is high time all individuals in use of loT devices to start being keen on the sharks in the water before it is too late.
References TEDx Talks. (2013, December 20). Swimming with sharks – security in the internet of things: Joshua Corman at TEDxNaperville. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ6xoAtdF3o&feature=youtu.be Gerber, A. (2017, November 17). Top 10 loT security challenges. lBM Developer. Retrieved from https://developer.ibm.com/articles/iot-top-10-iot-security-challenges/
James, L. (2018, November 15). 5 Tips for Securing Your Smart Devices and loT Devices. MUD. Retrieved from https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/tips-securing-smart-iot-devices/

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