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We Need to Develop IoT standards and Protocols to Protect Smart Homes

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We Need to Develop IoT standards and Protocols to Protect Smart Homes

Effective IoT standards and protocols are crucial for smart home safety today.

Devices are increasingly being targeted in cyberattacks, which have resulted in injury, harassment and invasions of user privacy. Security standards and protocols for IoT devices could help address the threats facing smart home product users. 

Rising IoT Security Threats

Smart home devices have increased in popularity significantly over the last few years. They’re becoming more affordable and accessible. Plus, more people are buying homes, causing a national housing shortage in the U.K. Unfortunately, as smart home devices become more widely used, hackers are taking notice. 

Over recent years, there have been more headlines about smart home devices being hacked, remotely accessed, or used to harass and terrorize people in their homes. For instance, Ring came under fire in 2020 when dozens of people reported these smart doorbells and security cameras being remotely controlled. 

Victims of the hacks included babies, children and older adults. Hackers took control of the users’ smart home security cameras and used them to spy on the residents and even talk to them. Sadly, these cases are becoming more common. 

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Other hacks on smart home devices, mainly cameras, have resulted in dangerous and disruptive police raid pranks. In these cases, the hacker uses a smart home security camera to livestream a raid on an innocent homeowner after calling in a fake alert to law enforcement. 

The Current State of IoT Standards and Protocols

Something must be done to ensure smart home devices are safe from cyberattacks. IoT items tend to get overlooked in cybersecurity efforts because they are not smartphones or computers. They might seem harmless enough, but they are still connected to the internet, which means they are at risk of being hacked. 

Smart home cybersecurity is still a relatively new field, though. IoT standards and protocols are crucial to securing these devices. However, creating any standardization is a challenge when different device brands are not compatible with one another. Some of the biggest companies are coming together to change that, though. 

Google, Amazon, Apple and other major smart home device manufacturers are forming a standardization platform known as Matter, which will establish some basic compatibility standards across all new smart home devices. Matter is the first major step toward smart home IoT standards and protocols. By committing to these standards, smart home device manufacturers will ensure their IoT devices are compatible with all other compliant items. 

This is great news for consumers, but it could also help strengthen IoT security. Matter has developed a set of privacy principles that all member manufacturers must comply with. These guidelines include minimizing data collection and storage, layering authentication methods, and providing secure firmware updates. The basic standards established by Matter will also make it easier for developers to create effective cybersecurity applications for smart homes. 

Strategies for Protecting IoT Devices

Matter standardization will go a long way toward improving compatibility between smart home devices and strengthening basic security. However, homeowners may wonder what they can do to protect their IoT devices now. Luckily, users can easily implement strategies to improve their smart home security. 

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Secure the Home Network

Homeowners should start by securing their home Wi-Fi network. This is especially important for anyone working remotely. Home network security must be a top priority for remote employees since they use their network to send and receive important and often sensitive information. Plus, these workers spend more time in their houses, which may lead them to use their smart home devices more often. 

Similarly, always change the default password on smart home devices. Many IoT items ship with weak default passwords. These are not secure and are often shared among numerous units, making them highly vulnerable to hacking. Hopefully, IoT standards and protocols for security will change this trend in the future. Right now, homeowners must ensure all their smart home devices have strong, unique passwords and use multifactor authentication when possible. 

Segment the Wi-Fi

Homeowners can secure their Wi-Fi networks by giving their network a long, complex password and using a high-quality router. It may also be a good idea to segment home Wi-Fi networks, which involves creating separate branches on the same system with isolated devices on each. People can use their router’s guest network for IoT devices. This way, if an IoT device is hacked, the attacker won’t have access to any PCs, phones or other items on it. 

Know the Signs of a Hack

Hopefully, strong passwords and a secure home network will successfully keep hackers out of homeowners’ smart home devices. It is a good idea to be aware of the signs of a hacked device just in case. This is particularly important with smart cameras and doorbells, which are among the most high-risk targets for device hacks. 

Signs of a compromised smart camera include an active recording light, higher than usual data traffic, unexplained sounds and random unit movement. Suspicious login activity on smart home apps is another dead giveaway. Sometimes hackers will even speak through hacked smart cameras. Homeowners should unplug their devices as soon as they notice any potentially suspicious activity. 

Be Careful About Camera Placement

Lastly, homeowners must be mindful of where they put IoT cameras and speakers around their smart homes. These devices can be useful for things like keeping an eye on children or watching for burglary attempts. However, hackers tend to choose vulnerable targets like children and older adults to harass. For instance, in 2019, a hacker taunted a little girl through the smart camera in her bedroom, telling her he was Santa Claus.  

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It may be a good idea to avoid putting smart cameras and speakers in bedrooms and bathrooms. Until more reliably secure items are developed, it is better to be safe than sorry. 

Improving IoT Standards and Protocols

Homeowners can use the strategies above to start protecting their smart home devices from hackers. However, in the long run, what smart homes really need are comprehensive IoT standards and protocols. Matter is a good starting point, but it will take large-scale action to ensure smart devices are using the best security tools and applications possible. 

For instance, IoT security standards could require all devices to ship with unique, secure default passwords. Users should still set their own strong ones, but it is clearly not something many people are doing. They simply aren’t familiar with cybersecurity best practices, so manufacturers need to step up to help protect them. 

Smart camera hacks seem to be one of the largest issues with device security, so these items should be a top priority in IoT standards. 

For instance, maybe smart cameras could come with a feature that records video without any capability to stream it. It might also help to require multifactor authentication to view, stream, or otherwise access a smart camera or speaker. Similarly, smart device manufacturers could mandate users change their passwords regularly, which could help prevent stolen or compromised login credentials from being used to hack smart home devices. 

Ultimately, it might take intervention by a federal organization or other authority to establish strict, universal IoT standards and protocols for smart device security. Some international organizations are already stepping up. 

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For example, the EU established a set of standards for consumer IoT devices in 2020 that applies to all member nations. Similarly, the International Standards Organization published IoT security and privacy guidelines in 2022, which can be accessed and used worldwide. In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology has also established a program to provide cybersecurity guidance for IoT devices. 

Implementing Smart Home Tech Safely

Hackers increasingly target smart home technology as it becomes more popular. Compatibility between brands is a nice quality-of-life feature, but security needs to be the top priority for Matter and other smart home standards organizations. From collaborations among manufacturers to large-scale international standards, IoT devices need baseline security protocols to ensure people can use technology safely, today and into the future. 


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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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