re Stepping Up Security for an Internet-of-Things World

["David Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Synthesis:Law and Technology" <synthesis.law.and.technology () gmail com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Stepping Up Security for an Internet-of-Things World
Date: October 17, 2016 at 8:54:51 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>

Dave,

Funny they should use that example of cars.  Hackers can get "in" to automobiles on a pretty reliable basis today and 
we are a few years out from seeing totally autonomous vehicles as a mainstay on the roads.

So bold predictions of "robots" to defend the cyber frontier seem optimistic at best.  Those robots themselves will be 
a target for hacking.  My bold prediction?  The hacks will be there before the sentinel software. 

We cant win an arms race.  We know that already.  We know it from war. We know ir from game theory. We know it from 
encryption. We know it from pretty much every experience.  Instead of trying to build a sentinel wall, we need a grand 
challenge for different ideas.  Not more of the same.  If i had a grand idea to safeguard the IoT it would go here.   
But i dont.  And it is scary because the problem is urgent. 


On Oct 17, 2016 8:29 AM, "David Farber" <farber () gmail com <mailto:farber () gmail com>> wrote:


Begin forwarded message:

From: Hendricks Dewayne <dewayne () warpspeed com <mailto:dewayne () warpspeed com>>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Stepping Up Security for an Internet-of-Things World
Date: October 17, 2016 at 5:20:31 AM EDT
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com <mailto:dewayne-net () warpspeed com>>
Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com <mailto:dewayne-net () warpspeed com>

Stepping Up Security for an Internet-of-Things World
By STEVE LOHR
Oct 16 2016
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/technology/security-internet.html 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/technology/security-internet.html>>

The vision of the so-called internet of things — giving all sorts of physical things a digital makeover — has been 
years ahead of reality. But that gap is closing fast.

Today, the range of things being computerized and connected to networks is stunning, from watches, appliances and 
clothing to cars, jet engines and factory equipment. Even roadways and farm fields are being upgraded with digital 
sensors. In the last two years, the number of internet-of-things devices in the world has surged nearly 70 percent to 
6.4 billion, according to Gartner, a research firm. By 2020, the firm forecasts, the internet-of-things population will 
reach 20.8 billion.

The optimistic outlook is that the internet of things will be an enabling technology that will help make the people and 
physical systems of the world — health care, food production, transportation, energy consumption — smarter and more 
efficient.

The pessimistic outlook? Hackers will have something else to hack. And consumers accustomed to adding security tools to 
their computers and phones should expect to adopt similar precautions with internet-connected home appliances.

“If we want to put networked technologies into more and more things, we also have to find a way to make them safer,” 
said Michael Walker, a program manager and computer security expert at the Pentagon’s advanced research arm. “It’s a 
challenge for civilization.”

To help address that challenge, Mr. Walker and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, created a 
contest with millions of dollars in prize money, called the Cyber Grand Challenge. To win, contestants would have to 
create automated digital defense systems that could identify and fix software vulnerabilities on their own — 
essentially smart software robots as sentinels for digital security.

A reminder of the need for stepped-up security came a few weeks after the Darpa-sponsored competition, which was held 
in August. Researchers for Level 3 Communications, a telecommunications company, said they had detected several strains 
of malware that launched attacks on websites from compromised internet-of-things devices.

The Level 3 researchers, working with Flashpoint, an internet risk-management firm, found that as many as one million 
devices, mainly security cameras and video recorders, had been harnessed for so-called botnet attacks. They called it 
“a drastic shift” toward using internet-of-things devices as hosts for attacks instead of traditional hosts, such as 
hijacked data center computers and computer routers in homes.

And last week, researchers at Akamai Technologies, a web content delivery company, reported another security breach. 
They detected hackers commandeering as many as two million devices, including Wi-Fi hot spots and satellite antennas, 
to test whether stolen user names and passwords could be deployed to gain access to websites.

The Cyber Grand Challenge was announced in 2013, and qualifying rounds began in 2014. At the outset, more than 100 
teams were in the contest. Through a series of elimination rounds, the competitors were winnowed to seven teams that 
participated in the finals in August in Las Vegas. The three winning teams collected a total of $3.75 million in prize 
money.

With the computer security contest, Darpa took a page from a playbook that worked in the past. The agency staged a 
similar contest that served to jump-start the development of self-driving cars in 2005. It took the winning team’s 
autonomous vehicle nearly seven hours to complete the 132-mile course, a dawdling pace of less than 20 miles per hour.

Still, the 2005 contest proved that autonomous vehicles were possible, brushing aside longstanding doubts and spurring 
investment and research that led to the commercialization of self-driving car technology.

“We’re at that same moment with autonomous cyberdefense,” Mr. Walker said.

[snip]

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