1 INTRODUCTION
From homes to hospitals, the power grid, the highway, and
the high seas, the Internet of Things (IoT) is destined to
change the way people live, do business, and interact with
their governments. The IoT's massive interconnections
of devices, or "things”, lead to new efficiencies and
capabilities, and unlock tremendous value for consumers,
organisations and governments. Imagine an intelligent
hospital system that links patient monitoring devices with
drug infusion pumps to prevent overdoses and reduce
false alarms. Or a smart city that automatically schedules
maintenance work to minimise street blockages and uses
smart lighting to de-escalate conflict situations in real
time13. Or connected farms that control their irrigation
systems based on the moisture content of the soil and on
the weather forecast, all the while deriving algorithmic
insights into optimal ways to grow and water crops. IoT
is one of the key enabling technologies to realise these
visions.
The number of IoT devices in operation continues to grow
exponentially. Gartner forecasts that the number of
connected things in use globally will surge from 8.4 billion
in 2017 to 20.4 billion by 2020, with total spending on
endpoints and services exceeding $2 trillion.14
Smart cities and smart nations15 are enabled by the
adoption of IoT along with related technologies such as
cloud computing and big data analytics. These technologies
can improve government operations, support better living,
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create new business opportunities, and support stronger
and safer communities.
But the aforementioned opportunities come with enormous
challenges. Beckstrom’s Law of Cybersecurity16 is a recent
Internet aphorism that, slightly paraphrased, states the
following:
1. Anything attached to a network can be hacked.
2. Everything is being attached to a network.
3. Therefore, everything can be hacked.
This pronouncement has proven largely accurate. In
December 2015, VTech, a manufacturer of educational toys
such as electronic learning devices, announced a security
breach exposing the personal data of over 6 million
people.17 Reports suggested that the breach exploited a
SQL injection vulnerability at the server and that the
account registration services did not use encrypted
communication.18 The devices themselves were not
compromised; however, the online services that the devices
connected to were not sufficiently secured. On October 21,
2016, multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
targeted Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn, causing
major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to
users in Europe and North America.19 The attack was
accomplished by issuing a large number of DNS lookup
requests from as many as 600,000 Internet-connected
devices20 – such as printers, IP cameras, residential
gateways and baby monitors – that were infected with the
https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/departments/built-environment/research/smart-cities-program/collaboration/living-labs/stratumseind/
https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917
https://www.smartnation.sg – Singapore Smart Nation website.
https://dld-conference.com/articles/its-a-mad-mad-mad-cyber-world
https://www.vtech.com/en/press_release/2018/faq-about-cyber-attack-on-vtech-learning-lodge/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34963686
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/21/13362354/dyn-dns-ddos-attack-cause-outage-status-explained
https://blog.cloudflare.com/inside-mirai-the-infamous-iot-botnet-a-retrospective-analysis/
11
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