Security in the Internet of Things: A challenge of scale

Technological scaling has offered a windfall of benefits to electronics design. Increased transistor density has offered an exponential increase in computing capabilities over time, but without a corresponding increase in system cost. Information security has its own success story with scaling. Cryptographic algorithms become exponentially harder to break through a mere linear increase in encryption complexity or in key-length. In the Internet of Things, scaling is as much a security liability as it is an advantage. These security liabilities are new, poorly understood and poorly regulated. Some examples include the following: privacy of IoT data in the cloud; the safety consequences of poor information security in cyber-physical systems; the liabilities of long-lifetime devices that use outdated or poorly tested information security; the performance-limited information security in devices that run on the outskirts of the IoT using nothing but harvested energy. In this contribution we consider the security landscape for IoT. We consider the technological consequences of securely extending the Internet into the physical world of things. We identify current limitations, ongoing research efforts, and open challenges for the design community.