A funny thing happened two hours out of Auckland, the cabin crew on the Air New Zealand flight to San Francisco announced the inflight entertainment system had to be rebooted.
In the thirty minutes it took for the system to reset and reload, various in-seat functions such as the cabin call button and light switch froze, it was a basic example of how complex systems interact with each other.
The benefits of a connected egg tray involve the device telling us when more eggs are needed, but what happens when the thing tries to tell your online shopping service that you need 200 dozen?
As the internet of things develops and business systems become more automated, complexity is going to become greater and more subtle. Understanding and managing the risks that extend from that is going to be essential for both public safety and the economy.
“The Internet of Things creates a whole new range of attack surfaces” Cisco Systems’ Enterprise Group Vice President Rod Soderbery told the Internet of Things conference in Barcelona last month.
One of those many ‘attack surfaces’ identified by Fraser Howard, Principle Researcher of Sophos Labs are the dozens of household devices from smart TVs to internet connected egg holders that are beginning to appear in homes.
Almost all these devices will have flaws in their firmware and yet almost no vendor has an interest in maintaining or patching the firmware of this equipment.
“Consumers have no way of managing this problem” says Fraser as it’s almost impossible for householders to upgrade their systems and consumer electronics manufacturers have a poor track security track record.
“There’s a long history of companies with mass market items which deal with things like important items like credentials where they have not had a single thought about security,” says Fraser.
Security is one the many challenges facing the internet of things along with to manage rogue devices in grid networks. There’s a lot of work to be done in ensuring systems aren’t disrupted by an outlier sensor or critical information disclosed by a poorly secured or out of date smart device.
As connected egg trays start talking to the supermarket, we have to be confident that we aren’t going to come home to find our connected device hasn’t delivered a pallet load of fresh eggs or that it hasn’t given away our banking details to an organised crime ring.
As it happens, I will be going on a long flight next year, and I plan to make sure I have a good book with me – so I can completely forget about entertainment systems, and not worry about whether they need booting up (I would have thought the idea of an entertainment system needing to boot up was almost as ridiculous as a toaster or transistor radio having to boot up). Additionally, it will maintain my sanity if any hold-ups happen at airports.
Internet egg-trays? I was wondering about that when it was mentioned on Tony Delroy’s program in advance a week or so ago, but the discussion never actually got onto that. What on earth next? Perhaps I need a toothbrush that can connect to the Internet – why not?
Whatever happened to the old idea of looking in the fridge to see if you need more eggs, and putting them on your shopping list? – or even going up specially to the shops to buy them if the need is urgent? This may save us a bit of effort, but if that trend continues massively, we will all end up getting fatter and fatter, and the public health bill very likely will eat up any savings new gimmicks like this may make in the beginning.
I think this story illustrates that many of our things are getting just far too interconnected, far too complicated. I think as a civilization we are headed for a truckload of trouble if we get too dependent on this sort of stuff and something goes horrendously wrong with it: either a fault develops that even the designers can’t figure out (or figure out quickly enough), or perhaps it gets infected by a virus or brought down by sabotage by terrorists. Perhaps terrorists might get hold of the master password of some important area of interconnectedness, encrypt the vital data, and demand a huge ransom (in money or political concessions) before releasing it – as with the CryptoLocker Trojan (look it up on Wikipedia), for example.
Also, I see this potentially as yet another way the already-excessive gap between the rich and the poor may be widened: as things get more complicated and more interconnected, there will be fewer and fewer things that can be either fixed, or replaced and installed, by non-technical people – yet the poorest may not be able to afford the expensive fees that technicians will probably charge to do it for them.
Do the designers and promoters of all this stuff ever think of potential problems like these? Or are they too caught up in their rosy haze of excitement over all these nice new shiny toys? Frankly, it scares me on almost every front.
The connected egg tray is more a proof of concept than anything else, Micheal.
One of the important things to keep in mind with the discussion of the Internet of Things is that these technologies are here and being rolled out as we speak. It’s fair enough to be afraid of them, but they’re coming anyway. I think it’s a better idea to understand them rather than fear them.