Protect the Internet of Things in the home

Protect the Internet of Things in the home

The IoT has invaded the home with fun, expensive, functional devices that are definitely personal even if they are not portable. Today's IoT home devices are premium products, yet given their practicality, they will be embraced by mainstream homeowners, renters, and even landlords. (Think about the potential synergy between the IoT and, say, Airbnb.)

Where the fun stops is in potential privacy concerns, and there's a value-added role that internet service providers (ISPs) can play in helping ensure an overall security posture for the IoT-enabled home.

Forget Fitbits and Apple Watches and think about the smart thermostat, the connected smoke detector, the digital door lock, the security system, the security cameras. Think about the Amazon Echo smart hub, Samsung Smart TVs with speech recognition, and even the pretty Philips Hue mood lighting.

Personal IoT devices, like those headline-grabbing Apple watches, use a smartphone as their connection hub. By contrast, most if not all home-based IoT equipment uses the home Wi-Fi network to connect to a cloud-based service provider. That's not universal; by default, the August smart lock talks to a phone via Bluetooth.

Some IoT devices also use Bluetooth for command-and-control. For example, you can pair an iPhone with the Amazon Echo and use it as a remote speaker. In general, however, the true hub of the home Internet of Things is the network router that acts as the DOCSIS head unit for cable or ADSL/VDSL head unit for DSL, with a few wired Ethernet ports and some flavor of 802.11 Wi-Fi in the mix.

All, or nearly all, of the home IoT traffic passes through that device. That includes telemetry sent into the cloud by the IoT devices, command-and-control pushed from the cloud to the devices (often through polling), firmware updates, and so on.

This centralized connectivity also enables the possibility for several types of mischief. Hackers might try to infiltrate the home router (which is often sitting with its default device password and either public Wi-Fi or one with an easy-to-guess password), and once on the network, get to the IoT devices. Hackers might also attack by attempting to compromise the cloud services behind the IoT and cause trouble that way.

To pick a third possibility, the cloud service providers backending the IoT products might behave in a not-very-nice way. Certainly, some have expressed fear after seeing what various smart televisions were doing with their data.

There is an opportunity for ISPs: the DOCSIS or ADSL/VDSL device is smart, and working in conjunction with the carrier's data center, it can act as a smart filter, as a kind of automated firewall that understands the customer's smart home and works behind the scenes to safeguard it.

Consider the value of antivirus/antimalware that filters at the carrier level, protecting IoT devices that truly can't defend themselves. The home router could easily detect which devices connecting to its Wi-Fi are IoT (as opposed to laptops, desktops, phone and tablets), and learn which services are allowed to talk to them.

Only Nest's server, for example, should be allowed to poll to the home thermostat to see if the consumer is home or away. Only August should be able to push new firmware to the digital door lock. Only Amazon should be able to see which commands the Echo is processing. But even in those cases, of course, the consumer should be able to block those services at their home network perimeter, confident that the IoT service can't circumvent the firewall.

And heaven only knows who should be accessing the SmartTV's microphone. Wouldn't that be a nice feature to add to the home router's control setting page – block the smart television microphone.

With the right consumer-friendly front end, the carrier-based IoT firewall could go a step further, offering the customer an inventory of active devices and the option to require discrete authorization before a new device can go live on the network.

The era of the home Internet of Things is upon us; soon, these devices will be in nearly every house, apartment, condo, and even dorm room. Carriers have a unique opportunity to guard those devices, because the IoT's customer is the carrier's customer too. That's a value-add customers would very likely embrace.

Cr. Networkworld  ,bangkok21st ,Synergy Electronic | Facebook

Wi-Fi of Things : Internet of Things

Wi-Fi of  Thing  :  Internet of Things

With projections of more than 5 billion connected devices by the end of this year and growth to 50 billion by 2020, the challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT) include a lack of standardization, security, integration, battery life, and rapid evolution. Wi-Fi, in its 16th year, is getting ready for IoT and will perhaps make the most suitable network for the technology. 

Why Wi-Fi will be the technology of choice for the Internet of Things
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IoT may be a recent buzzword, but the quest for connected things is old. Very old. Caller ID, connected Coca-Cola vending machines, M2M, smart meters, RFID, AutoID, etc. The whole appeal of connected things has been efficiency and experience. And the desire for experience and efficiency is even greater today.


We live in an experience era and have no patience. We expect 'great experience' and 'efficiency' around us. Only IoT can enable that. IoT is nothing but an intelligent and invisible network of things that communicate directly or indirectly with each other or the internet to enable experience and efficiency. Internet can connect to the World via Android TV Box

Here are some of the challenges facing the IoT, and how Wi-Fi can help address them.
IoT needs a standardized technology for connecting devices to each other or the cloud

The things (as in Internet of things) typically employ some kind of embedded technology that allows them to sense conditions such as pressure, humidity, temperature, motion, number of people in an area, etc. And then a technology allows them to connect to other things or the cloud so that they can send the information as well as be programmed.

There are many standards and proprietary solutions used for connecting things to each other or to the cloud: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Active RFID, loWPAN, EtherCAT, NFC, RFID to name a few. The choice of technology is usually dictated by the physical characteristics of the environment, such as the presence of wood, concrete, metal etc., the density of sensors, desired range, and data rates.

Among these technologies, Wi-Fi has been the most successful. It has become a ubiquitous standard of connectivity and is used in the home, enterprise, schools, hospitals, airports etc.

However, as the number of devices connected to a Wi-Fi Access Point or the distance of device to Access Point is limited, many Active RFID technologies that operate in sub 1-GHz bands are used for things too. Active RFID technologies allow a large number of devices as well as larger ranges.

To overcome these challenges, a new IEEE Wi-Fi standard 802.11ah using the 900MHz band has been in works and will solve the need of connectivity for a large number of things over long distances. A typical 802.11ah access point could associate more than 8,000 devices within a range of 1 km, making it ideal for areas with a high concentration of things. The Wi-Fi Alliance is committed to getting this standard ratified soon. With this, Wi-Fi has the potential to become a ubiquitous standard for IoT.

And, not to mention, the growth of the IoT has just started. We are rapidly evolving, but there is a lot of unknown. Unknown applications, unknown devices, and unknown use cases. The best way to proceed is using one common worldwide standard for technology and application programming interfaces that can get these devices to talk to each other and to the cloud without networking infrastructure upgrades.

Standardization and implied interoperability is one of the main reasons Wi-Fi is very popular, and that's another big reason that it is suitable for the IoT.
Needs of security and protecting privacy in the borderless world created by IoT are real

IoT creates a borderless world where things talk to the cloud. Network or device administrators may not even realize the firmware or operating systems of these things or the cloud applications that these things talk to. In other words, protecting privacy and preventing malicious activity will be a challenge.


One may not even know what other information these things will send or how that information is used. Too many cloud apps, too many APIs, too many hackers out there. For security and policy enforcement, SDN is the most natural solution, and in the last couple of years, a good effort has happened in the industry around SDN (software-defined networking) enablement of Wi-Fi. With SDN, Wi-Fi enables unified policy management as IoT device traffic can be scanned and secured at the network entry point.
Without energy efficiency, maintenance overhead of things will be too substantial

As most of these things need to be portable or self-sustaining, stretching battery power or harvesting energy is almost a must. The battery change cannot be required every few days or weeks. And batteries  should be preferably using solar like Solar Lamp (โคมไฟพลังงานแสงอาทิตย์,โคมไฟโซล่าเซลล์ หรือ ตะเกียงไฟฟ้า) or Solar Light, wind, thermal, and other energy mechanisms.

Significant efforts in the industry have been going on for many years to make Wi-Fi low power, and many vendors now specialize in low-power Wi-Fi chipsets. Additionally, 802.11ah helps with lower-power consumptions and most recent innovations around backscatter Wi-Fi can enable a no-power or battery-assisted low-power Wi-Fi.

At this point, Wi-Fi appears to be the most suitable choice for the IoT as it has the potential to address all the challenges. I would love to hear your feedback about this.

Cr.Network World