The Dark Side of Things

Abstract

Over the last years the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a reality, moving from a futuristic topic to something pretty much everybody has some experience with. We are all using apps that tell us how to remain fit, and enable us to remotely control our heating, monitor health conditions and even in some cases save people’s lives. These are of course only a small fraction of the endless applications of IoT. Gartner predicts that by 2020 more than 20 billion connected “Things” will be in use, and some estimates are even higher. That is a lot of “Things” that will know something about us! Whilst IoT opens the doors to new opportunities (and who would not like a fridge that checks what is missing and send a reminder on what to buy?), it also creates new challenges on the security and privacy side. New Things are launched daily on the market, but how much do companies invest in securing users’ access, privacy, and users’ data collected by Things and often residing on the providers’ cloud? Things collect an enormous amount of data that in the wrong hands may lead to dangerous data leaks. This section provides an overview on Federated Identity Management (FIM) and its key aspects; it continues with exploring the challenges to expand the traditional federated identity management to IoT and provides an overview on how to authenticate devices and secure the way the data they collect are transmitted in a secure way.