Classroom Companion: Business

 
Chapter 2 ·
Information and Communication Technologies

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powerline communication. Several technologies may be connected in tandem, for 
example, a Wi-Fi network connecting several local sensors to a local processing 
platform connected to a 5G network.
There are several concerns regarding IoT, the most important of which are 
related to privacy, security, and safety. Efficient health-care applications generate 
enormous amounts of personal data. These data may be abused by the authorities 
for political manipulation and social control. Other abuses may be surveillance of 
people and recording of consumer behavior. In many IoT applications, sensitive 
information about people may be sent over multiple hops and stored and processed 
several times in different computers, severely increasing the probability that confi-
dential information is compromised.
Security is the biggest concern related to IoT. The IoT will consist of billions 
of devices designed to different security standards (if any at all). Security concerns 
include weak authentication, weak or no access control protection, unencrypted 
messages, no firewall protection, and improper security updating. The result is a 
network with very many access points vulnerable to cyberattacks. In some applica-
tions, for example, autonomous driving and remote monitoring of medical devices, 
cyberattacks may result in accidents and loss of life. Poorly protected IoT devices 
may be captured and assimilated in large botnets to become formidable tools in 
distributed denial of service attacks. Internet of Things Security Foundation is 
a nonprofit international organization promoting security best practices and 
management.
Safety is an important issue in IoT systems, particularly, those used in complex 
systems where errors may lead to disasters. IoT systems may, as all software sys-
tems, contain bugs, flaws, and unintended interactions. One characteristic of com-
plex systems is that they may contain pathways into hidden states causing deadlock 
or other errors. These states may be legitimate operational states in some applica-
tions but may cause problems in other cases. The existence of such conditions is 
difficult to identify using standard software production and checking tools. Systems 
controlling hardware are particularly vulnerable to errors leading to unsafe physi-
cal states because of the damage they may instigate, for example, power grids, 
sluices regulating river flows, pacemakers, or traffic safety systems for autonomous 
driving.
The term Internet of Things was coined by Kevin Ashton at Procter & Gamble 
in 1999 (Ashton, 
2009
). At that time, a few simple logistics applications existed 
such as routing of luggage in airports, tagging of containers and goods for simple 
identification and sorting, and locating objects and animals (e.g., tagging of cattle 
and pets). Between 2008 and 2009, the number of objects connected to the Internet 
surpassed the number of people connected to the network. According to Cisco, the 
ratio of connected objects to connected people was only 0.08 in 2003, while in 2010 
this number had increased to 1.84 (Evans, 
2011
).
There are several obstacles slowing the evolution of IoT: lack of killer appli-
cations; unclear business propositions and usability; lack of standards and 
interoperability; security, safety, and privacy concerns; and, perhaps the most 
important, IoT not fitting easily into traditional public or industrial governance 
structures.