Building on a secure foundation for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing in different ways. The adoption rate of the IoT is at least five times faster than the adoption of electricity and telephony. Moreover, it is becoming the backbone of the future of the Internet that encompass various applications and devices. The IoT faces many challenges that stand as a barrier for the successful deployment. The security is considered the most difficult challenge that need to be addressed. Our work was instructed by the Internet of Things Security Foundation (IoTSF) in order to guide the future focus for the steering group to identify which areas of the IoT security to prioritize its efforts. The IoTSF has a mission to address the security needs of the IoT in order to ensure that its adoption can meet its predicted aspirations for establishing the business value. An initial focus on providing advice and best practice to hinder repeats of the mayhem enabled by the Mirai infection of consumer remote cameras and mainstream consumer vehicles, that is working towards building consensus for an internationally “approved by” mark that consumers can look for to determine security. This is addressing the need for trusted boot, root of trust, signed binary images and encrypted communication channels to secure the remote device. This paper suggests that the next area for consideration for The IoTSF is a co-operative security, a means of building trust into a group such that a collection of data sources that provide different telemetry data that are used in analytics to formulate an action are of known, secure origin.