Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The varied types of devices that populate the IoT
both end points and infrastructure
-
nodes
fall into the category of embedded systems. Manufacturers of so-called con-
-
nected
have been incrementally embracing open source for two
decades. Starting with a shift from proprietary compilers and debuggers in the 1990s,
device developers went on to embrace embedded Linux through the 2000s, and over the
last
“
intelligent devices
”
ve years they have begun to build (non-mobile) devices with Android. In the same
time period, device manufacturers have shifted their source code control and build
engines from legacy proprietary solutions to SVN, GIT, Github, Chef, Puppet and
“
hot
”
OSS projects and technologies.
4 Meeting Key IoT Challenges with OSS
The IoT presents the following security and privacy challenges: physical attacks to end-
point devices and various physical interfaces, spoo
ng of local wireless/mesh net-
works, vulnerabilities from poorly implemented interfaces and authentication, and lack
of security updates due to deployment type. None of these challenges is insurmount-
able, but there exist no magic bullets either. The most ubiquitous
on the
Internet today are mobile phones and tablets, which stand out as a morass of security
problems.
While surely key in innovating solutions to IoT security challenges, open source is
just one factor in any comprehensive IoT security and privacy paradigm. Equally
important are best development practices and development tools to augment and
enforce those practices. What does make OSS more amenable to security remediation is
its very openness. Beyond
“
things
”
, readily available source
code and published OSS project information (e.g., on GitHub and from Black Duck
OpenHub) enable automation of otherwise tedious and technically-challenging activ-
ities related to identifying security vulnerabilities, out-of-date versions, inactive or
poorly maintained projects, assessing and remediating components with known vul-
nerabilities and monitoring IoT device and application codebases to ensure future
security.
“
many eyes making bugs shallow
”
5 Conclusion
That open source software will help drive the IoT build-out is obvious, but dominance
in IoT technologies is not a foregone conclusion. Open source does sustain and indeed
dominate large swaths of intelligent device, networking, network infrastructure, and
cloud platform software. For that strong position to translate into IoT dominance,
developer communities will still have to cross key gaps and implement technologies
essential to the IoT:
Scalable (downward) system software that meets the needs of myriad end-point
device types, especially on lower-end silicon.
Open source implementations of mesh networking drivers and mesh network
management middleware, utilities, and tools.
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