Why little data and its security is as important as Big Data for IoT to be trusted

By Guru Ganesan, Managing Director, ARM India

The ‘Internet of Things’ is certainly shaping up to be the buzzword and it is expected, that by 2020 around 1.6bn IoT devices will be shipped for smart homes, around 1.8bn for smart cities, 0.6bn for industrial and 1.1bn for other sectors. The numbers clearly indicate the scope of new ecosystem, new opportunities and new business models, but with the increase in adoption of IoT, the question of how safe our data is, remains extremely relevant.

The Internet has transformed society in ways that couldn’t have been predicted and the mobile revolution has only made it more so by giving billions of people around the world instant, on the-go access. There are many predictions about IoT as well, but history has shown that predictions most likely go wrong. For example, Popular Magazine had quoted in 1950 that computers of the future would only weigh 1.5 tons. Forecasters are good at being wrong about size and scale of computing waves. Fortunately, they were wrong about the size and weight of computers too.

It is also estimated that there are around 9 million mobile developers, 8 million web developers and around 600,000 embedded developers worldwide. But with the investment of around $1.5bn in IoT startups in 2015, the talent pool is not skilled enough to cater to the demand of producing secured devices. But unlike the 1990’s, today IoT gives us the opportunity to build secure systems from the start. Due to this, we now can effectively enable <$1 microcontroller designs, which are made by people who may have very little security experience.

Little data happens when tiny connected computers are embedded everywhere. In the recently concluded MWC 2016 for example, one could hear examples of smart cities, smart agriculture & connected cars and even connected teddy bears toys.

Security in connected devices is mostly a balance; a balance between the cost/effort to attack and the cost/effort to secure. But either way we see it, security is a gating issue. When done well, it can provide a foundation for services, capabilities & user experiences. Enabling trust and security in IoT devices is where the opportunity lies to create value.

If you can trust devices and the little data, you can transform industries. Electricity meter for example; if you can trust the remote meter reading on a customer’s meter, there would be no need for the distribution company to send someone to the house. This reduces personnel and eventually billing costs. Similarly, home security. If you can trust a connected security system, you will be more likely to purchase and enable remote monitoring.

So what could possibly go wrong?And why is it necessary to design systems with security in mind from the ground up? Case in point is the recent heist in UK in which diamonds worth upto $300 Million were stolen. Security looked fool proof. But thieves exploited a weakness. They broke into the lift shaft on the roof and into the basement with a drill worth $5000. They managed to dig through 2 meters of concrete. The lesson here is that it’s often hard to spot the security weakness. And crime can occur anytime.

With IoT and little data, what we care about is cyber crime. And what many of the recent episodes of security holes have shown is that with the potential for pervasiveness of IoT, cyber issues can get very personal.

One of the areas where we’ve already started seeing a higher adoption of connected technologies is in healthcare. No one wants personal health records to be hacked into. But it’s already happening and that too before IoT takes off. With IoT, the number of targets will only explode. Similarly, the area of connected or smart homes;while cameras can make the home more secure, a hacked camera does the opposite.

So it’s imperative for us to get the little data and its security right as much as the big data for IoT to be trusted. What we’ve yet to see is a consistent pattern of focus on security within the electronics industry and developer community. As IoT becomes more pervasive there will be more sharing of data than ever before, all coming from a range of different devices and systems. It will in fact attain new levels of value. Therefore, protecting data will be paramount, and since the technology is still in its infancy, so the time to act is now It’s necessary that security is designed-in at the start. Not as an after thought. And it has to be easy to deploy.

The software needs to be secure, but that needs secure hardware architecture. IoT is expected to be in billions of devices. So ARM is designing security features to create a root of trust. Keys, robust crypto, encryption hardware enable secure software to be built on top. And the request for industry is to do the same.

The industry and IoT innovators should avoid proprietary standards and support open standards, so we can collectively ensure that the devices can be managed in the field.

IoT is fundamentally all about trust. But without security, there’ll be no trust and we wouldn’t be able to extract its true benefits.