During the dark days of the Tech Wreck, the poster product for the heady excesses of the Dot Com era was the connected fridge.
Today it could be the iKettle that marks the height of the Internet of Things craze, a kettle you can control from your smartphone.
While the app doesn’t automatically fill the kettle; it does allow you to turn it on, schedule times and control the water temperatures.
The problem though is what happens when your kettle or phone can’t connect to the internet?
Burning data centres
Over the weekend, Samsung customers learned what happens when a connected device can’t connect when a fire in a South Korean data centre triggered an outage that prevented the company’s smart TV, Blu-Ray player and phone customers from properly using their equipment.
It would be really irritating if you couldn’t boil a kettle because your internet was down, however the more serious question is what happens when your home’s smoke detectors can’t connect? Or when your smarthome or connected car can’t authenticate your identity and locks you out?
Securing the IoT supply chain
For industry, the problems are even more pressing; in the not too distant future a truck carrying perishable goods may well have its deliveries refused by a customer if the cargo has lost connectivity.
In life or mission critical applications, relying on connections that may not be dependable could have disastrous consequences.
While the iKettle might be a bit of gimmick, it raises some important issues of what happens should your internet connection go down.
If the Internet of Things is to be trusted by households and industry, it’s essential that systems are robust and maintain operations when they’re disconnected.
The script kiddie finds the NSA-mandated back door in your kettle, sets the temp to 1200°C, boils it dry and burns your house down. Yay technology!
One would hope your Google connected smoke detector would update your Google Plus status to let your folks know where to go to identify your remains, Ewen.
I am amazed and disappointed that such a question comes up in the first place: of course the Kettle will work, provided the grid is not down . . . .
It is inconceivable that people in the industry even consider such ‘light’ applications and protocols over ‘the internet’ without even considering reliablility, resilience, safety, security . . . .
Hopefully designers in transport such as aeronautics and automotive continue not to take safety and security so lightly!
Concerning the grid, the inappropriate use of the grid, designed to privode an increased quality of service with respect to reliance on a single power source, has already led to increased risk of ‘brownouts’ with almost unbound scope and consequences.
IoT is a fantastic addition to our ICT tools, allowing information, more and better to be collected, allowing existing applications to work better, applicatiosn to be enriched, and new applications to e developed.
The risk is, however, that ‘smart’ people reinvent the wheel, starting from a certainly less successful and overtaken square model . . .
Combining IoT with the rich existing experience in applications and engeneering, e.g. process control, will enable new opportunities, but impemented in a safe and secure way.
Cees J.M. Lanting
Good Comments Cees, I’m confident in most cases engineers will make sure connected devices work safely in the event they lose connectivity.
However there are real risks in the edge cases, and it’s quite possible in a complex and interconnected world that an innocent kettle app could end up causing a serious problem in the wrong set of circumstances.
While the internet of things is here and it’s going to get bigger, we do everyone a disservice if we don’t discuss potential risks along with the benefits.