Explosion in IoT reveals risk of massive black market

In a recent report Gartner predicts that by 2020 over 50% of new major business process and system will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things. From a security perspective this growth will be challenge from many perspectives.

An interesting prediction in the analysis is that in 2020 Gartner expects that there will be a black market that exceeds $5 billion in value and that this is used to sell fake sensor and video data for enabling either criminal activities or to protect personal integrity. The criminal activities include activities such as;

• getting access to sensitive information about an organization or individual
• tampering and/or exchanging data to gain advantages such as getting access to premises

Personal integrity will also be a prime subject since the amount of data that is collected can be highly intrusive for an individual so individuals and organizations will seek methods to obfuscate location, behavior and state as they do not want to share this data uncontrolled which will be a disadvantage for commercial and public sector organizations who wants to provide services to the possessor of the data, a scenario that is a great disadvantage to the algorithm economy that brings a great promise to improve the world.

So providing methods to trust between IoT elements is key in terms of protection of the data as well as providing authenticity and origin of the data. Luckily there are already standards in place such as OAuth and UMA or in development in groups like ACE to provide a trusted scalable framework.

Gartner also predicts a rise in spending on security for IoT where it today is a 1% of the overall security budget it expected to be around 20% in 2020.

Full report can be found here for Gartner subscribers http://www.gartner.com/document/3174718?ref=solrAll&refval=160212104&qid=3e6f6b347b08de2e11eae1fbe07165e5

/Per Hägerö, Business Unit Director