Prepare your IoT shield to maintain peace at home

Could anyone imagine perpetrating an attack from your printer and someone gets their home Netflix show hacked?

The peace of mind we gain when IoT home devices take charge of annoying routines make more enjoyable to feel connected to home, breath when the system turns on the AC before we get home after a desert day, dim the lights, control the thermostat, activate motion sensor and control doors, not to forget that it make us the coffee.

The fourth industrial revolution, the one machines are already leading, is approaching our level of happiness to that one of Wallace and Grommit in their fully automated home, with a robotized bed sliding Wallace from the bed to its clothes in, and down to the breakfast. While the cartoon from the 90´s is the result of and artisan craft, the idea is the same but our devices are mainstream now and connected to clouds.

According to Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, in the next twenty years we will have a trillion devices connected. What many did not foresee was how to integrate –rather than aggregate- all those devices and, most of all, how to defend our houses from DDoS attacks on our hyper connected devices.

In this new era of M2M (Machine to Machine) communication, if we let our guard down and get careless, and then the dream becomes a nightmare of machines attacking us.

Given the reality that the more devices connected, the most complicated our own platforms become, we have no choice but to protect ourselves. And the sooner we build our shields, the better for our peace of mind. Here there are two options to help protecting our IoT life: Augmate and Defensor (DEF Systems), and instead of controlling the devices themselves, they control what circulates on them.

Augmate is a device managerial platform for wearable and IoT management using distributed ledgers.  “Rather than control the device, we control the data flow,” says Dana Farbo at BII Summit in Dubai. Augmate is protocol-agnostic blockchain and integrates Hdac Tech, CPChain, IoT Chain,  Blockchain of things, WaltonChain, Atonomoni,  and IOTA-Tangle (which “works” similarly to blockchain but without fee or miners because users must authenticate two transactions to see their own one moving ahead).

Augmate observed that when an IoT consumer device –home, office or factory- connects to enterprise platforms, it may pose vulnerability threats to their networks, and so Augmate aggregates all the consumer device management into a single, app portal. The platform uses Blockchain because it has numerous advantages to protect the flow between our IoT Gateway, the cloud and centralized servers: as authenticates users, it posts the data securely and eliminates single point of failure, as well as blocking potential for malware to infect the devices.

AT IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Mr Farbo cites, there is a growing need on IoT to increase trust (only designated people to access data/devices), identity (validation), privacy (data protected), protection (physical, financial, reputational), safety (for infrastructures) and security (data, devices, people).

Defensor (DEF) is the “world´s first decentralized blockchain and decentralized computing platform for network security,” says Adam McBride at BII Summit. Their proposal is very interesting: as there are insufficient nodes to stop malicious attacks, McBride explains, and attacks may be launched from smart devices –who could imagine perpetrating an attack from your printer and someone gets their home Netflix show hacked–, we may allow DEF to utilize those IoT devices that we don´t use at night, and the company will use them to lower the cost of networks protection. At the same time, the devices owner gets paid for allowing their use.

It is an efficient, low cost solution, and the data he uses to quantify the effects of DDoS makes even clearer the call to action for protection against DDoS: every attack lasts for an average of six hours at a 500Mb/s speed, causing $500K loses per attack. This year, McBride says, 300,000 DDos have happened and originated $150B of damages, and half of the sites will have an attack in the near future.

DEF, based in blockchain and compatible with Ethereum smart contracts, takes massive family ARM  intelligent device as the main node, and uses blockchain to manage, schedule and keep accounts safe.

Most probably your thoughts are looking now for hypothetical risks at IoT home or work situations in desperate need of practical applications. Maybe these applications help to reach peace of mind.