In his classic book “Unsafe at Any Speed”, Ralph Nader assailed the auto industry and their approach to styling and cost efficiency at the expense of safety during the 1960s. He squared up on perceived defects in the Chevrolet Corvair, but extended his view to wider issues such as tire inflation ratings favoring passenger comfort over handling characteristics.
History has not treated Nader’s work kindly, possibly because of his politics including a crusade on environmental issues which spurred creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Sharp criticism of Nader’s automotive fault-finding came from Thomas Sowell in a book “The Vision of the Anointed”. He targeted “Teflon prophets,” Nader foremost among them, who foretell of impending calamity using questionable data, unless government intervenes as regulatory savior.
Sowell’s most scathing indictment of Nader was for failing to understand the trade-off between safety and affordability. Others targeted Nader’s logic by suggesting some non-zero level of risk and injury is acceptable if society progresses, supported by data the Corvair was actually no worse in terms of safety among its contemporaries on the automotive market at the time.
Yet, almost five decades later, we have Toyota sudden acceleration damage awards, GM ignition switches and massive recalls in progress, and the prospect that someday soon an autonomous car may go haywire. The problem seems to be not errors of commission, but errors of omission; complex engineering requirements, design, and test are becoming increasingly difficult. Getting all that done at volumes and prices needed to drive model year expectations and consumer market share is a big ask.
In an industrial context of the IoT, “safety critical” design is a science, with standards, and certification, and independent testing. In application segments such as aerospace and defense, medical, industrial automation, and others – even the automotive industry, which has made huge strides in electronics and software development – safety and risk are proactively managed.
Security of consumers on the IoT is another matter. Devices are inexpensive, often created by teams with little to no security experience. Worse yet, there is a stigma around many security features as unnecessary overkill that would slow down performance, get in the way of usability, or increase costs beyond competitiveness. This is an accident waiting to happen.
Or perhaps, one already in progress, if we believe the recent study on firmware in a sampling of consumer devices. A lot of folks think benevolent hackers are also polytetrafluoroethylene-coated, but it is hard to dispute there is cause for concern among embedded devices when it comes to security – especially when those devices connect to networks.
One of the areas cited in the study is encryption, and some rather sloppy handling of keys when it is used. Across the industry, embedded software is wildly inconsistent in approaches to encryption. As the study points out, developers are prone to stamp out copies of aged, flawed solutions because they are comfortable with and invested in a particular approach.
Regulation is the last thing we need here. Engineers need a lot more education, starting from the basics of including and using hardware encryption units on MCUs and SoCs, through the state-of-the-art knowledge in cryptography and certificate management, and up to IT-style approaches such as over-the-air software updates and two-factor authentication.
We also need some deeper thought on encryption implementations, beyond just NIST recommendations. In a web context, we have Transport Layer Security (TLS), but that protocol requires a full IP stack and a lot more horsepower than many small embedded devices can afford. On top of that, hardware encryption is currently very vendor-dependent. Vendors like Atmel are working with ARM on TrustZone technology to create newer implementations based on Trusted Exectuion Environment APIs, tuned for IoT devices instead of data center use.
Historically, encryption has been applied to securing closed systems – the IoT presents a paradox. If it devolves into a myriad of smaller, effectively closed systems that only intermittently share data, we may gain some benefit, but will never reach the vision.
The best case scenario is an effective set of industry practices emerge for encryption in consumer IoT devices before problems become widespread, defeating the very purpose of sharing data with the cloud. We need developers to not avoid encryption, but for that to happen it has to be cost- and implementation-effective for easier use.
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