PCB007 Magazine

PCB007-Feb2020

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40 PCB007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2020 all things. It was a smart fish tank that some- one could monitor or control remotely, and it was unsecured. From there, they were able to start transferring funds from the casino. It was huge. Shaughnessy: Without a gun. Watson: Right. Shaughnessy: You have to admit that was kind of clever. Watson: Sure. With these great hardware ad- vancements, how we secure these networks has now become a major issue. We have a hard- ware identification embedded into our hard- ware so that each one of those is controlled by a Mac address. That's all I can say about how we've done this, but it's something that has to go hand in hand with design now. We can't de- pend on firmware to secure our systems. Shaughnessy: IoT is a cool idea, but on the oth- er hand, all of these things that are connected are going to have an identity that hackers can find, if they take the time to look. Watson: I don't know if it's a cool idea or not. It's a cool-sounding idea. I bought a smart re- frigerator that can tell me what I'm out of, and updates are sent directly to my phone. My con- cern is that I also have a smart scale. What will happen when my refrigerator starts talking to my smart scale, and I say to my refrigerator, "Add a dozen donuts to my shopping list?" It will be like a scene from "2001: A Space Odys- sey." The fridge might say, "You know, John, I've been talking to the scale, and we've de- cided to put you on a diet, so I can't do that. I'm sorry, John." Shaughnessy: "I'm doing it for your own good. Trust me (laughs)." Watson: IoT is a huge industry. I understand there are supposed to be 20 billion new prod- ucts installed, such as sensors. All these differ- ent items are going to be sensing and monitor- ing everything, which comes with a warning, because it all has to be secured. Shaughnessy: Are there standards for security for this? Watson: There are security standards in place, but you don't want someone to be able to pull up in front of a skyscraper, tap in, and start controlling everything. Happy Holden: That reminds me of the 36-year- old science fiction movie called "Runaway," starring a young Tom Selleck as a cop whose job is to catch runaway robots, including office robots delivering mail that were going berserk. It was extremely humorous in 1984, but if you were to watch that movie today, you would be very much alarmed. However, 36 years ago, it was science fiction. One of the funniest things was Selleck's character was having a conversation with a for-hire guard in his seventies in a language that only those of us with a Ph.D. in network- ing could understand, but it was common jar- gon. Even the 70-year-old guard talked about protocols and handshakes and things like that, but the audience didn't appreciate it because they didn't know enough about what they were talking about. Watson: Now, that's common knowledge. There's even a tractor that can connect to the internet. Holden: I've seen those. I love them. Watson: Also, the whole autonomous vehicle industry is a space where everybody wants it. Some people look at these vehicles as a chal- lenge; they say, "I'm going to try hacking into that autonomous vehicle," and some hackers have. Holden: Over the last two years, I've been given four Echo Dot devices, which are always on and listening so that you can talk to it. Watson: But they say they're not listening, Happy. They wouldn't lie (laughs)!

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