IoT, a danger to safety!

Nowadays, Internet of Things, more familiar under the acronym IoT, is the new innovation subject. Orange has counted more than 14 billion objects, twice as many as humans on Earth, for a total of 25 billion interconnections worldwide. Thanks to Big Data, these tools are full of promise. They save us time, take care of housework and free us from our constraints. These objects bear witness to our lives: they come alive in our presence, know us and recognize us. They enter our intimate sphere in the form of a connected vacuum cleaner, surveillance camera, light or scale. They are at the heart of our home. Digital transformation extends to the city. Thanks to the IoT, it is possible to manage the lighting of the city, waste, public transport…

We trust them by giving them all our information, but are they as reliable as we think?

In April 2018, a casino in Las Vegas was hacked by a connected thermometer in the entrance aquarium. This item gave them a network entry point to go back into the cloud and hack all customer data from the “big players”.

“Our objects are connected within a sensitive network where each new point of contact is a source of vulnerability,” says Darktrace CEO Kenren Elazari, who specializes in cyber security. The medical field, a very high-risk area, is pointed at.

Not necessarily, answered the experts from Orange, but we must be aware of the dangers and minimize them. It is Orange’s role to be an intermediary player in the network aimed at protecting direct consumers.
Behind each object is one or more APIs, hiding as the tip of the iceberg. However, APIs are at the heart of the system, as they are harder to understand, less palpable to the general public. They are an important element, including in the protection of our data.

The IoT represents millions of interconnections forming a network requiring an operator. Adding an object to this network also means adding a weakness. Confidence is one of the keys to the success of the IoT, so risk management must be ensured. It’s called security by design or by operation. The goal of Orange is to add an additional independent layer of security by protecting its network by setting up Firewalls.

For this, Orange analyzes the behavior of objects and their risk factor. Orange also has many authentication APIs with the highest protection certifications. This phenomenon will increase with the arrival of 5G and the ability of orange to connect millions of objects simultaneously in low consumption.

We will be presenting these solutions in detail on Orange Developers in the near future.