Lecture 3.2: Risks, Privacy, and Security

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From the course by University of California, Irvine

Introduction to the Internet of Things and Embedded Systems

3180 ratings

University of California, Irvine

Introduction to the Internet of Things and Embedded Systems

3180 ratings

Course 1 of 6 in the Specialization An Introduction to Programming the Internet of Things (IOT)

The explosive growth of the “Internet of Things” is changing our world and the rapid drop in price for typical IoT components is allowing people to innovate new designs and products at home. In this first class in the specialization you will learn the importance of IoT in society, the current components of typical IoT devices and trends for the future. IoT design considerations, constraints and interfacing between the physical world and your device will also be covered. You will also learn how to make design trade-offs between hardware and software. We'll also cover key components of networking to ensure that students understand how to connect their device to the Internet. Please note that this course does not include discussion forums. Upon completing this course, you will be able to: 1. Define the term “Internet of Things” 2. State the technological trends which have led to IoT 3. Describe the impact of IoT on society 4. Define what an embedded system is in terms of its interface 5. Enumerate and describe the components of an embedded system 6. Describe the interactions of embedded systems with the physical world 7. Name the core hardware components most commonly used in IoT devices 8. Describe the interaction between software and hardware in an IoT device 9. Describe the role of an operating system to support software in an IoT device 10. Explain the use of networking and basic networking hardware 11. Describe the structure of the Internet 12. Describe the meaning of a “network protocol” 13. Explain MANETs and their relation to IoT

From the lesson

What Is the Internet of Things (IoT)?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a popular buzzword right now, but unlike many fads which have come and gone, the Internet of Things describes an important trend which is having lasting effects on society at large. The term itself, “Internet of Things”, is used to mean a variety of ideas, depending on the motivation and background of the speaker. This course will start by providing a definition of the term. We will talk about how various trends have enabled the Internet of Things, and how it changes the way design is performed. We will also discuss some of the ramifications that IoT is having on society today.

Lecture 3.1: Societal Benefits of IoT5:23

Lecture 3.2: Risks, Privacy, and Security11:08

Meet the Instructors

Ian Harris
Professor
Department of Computer Science

[MUSIC]

So in this lecture we'll discuss some of the downsides of Internet of Things

technology, some of the risks, and especially the privacy and

security issues that come up when you have IoT devices as pervasive as they are doing

things and out of your control at some extent.

So, one advantage that we listed in the last lecture

was that you don't have to depend on people as much.

You can depend on your IoT device to do things for you, and

you don't have to deal with people as much.

So the downside of that is potential social isolation, right?

You don't have to leave your house if you don't want to.

You can be a hermit.

Stay in your house, never walk out, and have everything come to you.

Right?

Now, usually it doesn't go to that extreme, but it can happen.

It depends on the mindset of the person who's using the device.

But if you need to interact with people less,

you have less of an excuse to go out there and deal with people.

And this picture is showing all these people looking at their cell phones.

This a constant problem, right?

People looking at their phones even in quote unquote, social engagements.

Say you're at a party and people at the party, which is meant for

human interaction, reading their cellphones and

looking down at their devices rather than actually interacting.

So, you can have this increased risk of social isolation because you don't have to

to interact with people.

Another big problem with IoT is that you're now more dependent on technology,

and all the infrastructure that comes along with it.

So, if things go down, like for instance my email.

And this is not even really an Internet of Things issue.

But, email, I use it on a standard computer or my phone too, if I want to.

But if email goes down, it's a serious impediment to me.

I need my email on a daily basis, really, an hourly basis.

I need to get emails from people.

And so, when that type of thing goes down, it's a problem for work and

even for personal life, right?

I communicate with some people personally with some people through email,

or texting or whatever communication technology you use.

When you're using it through IoT, through the internet, and through your devices,

when your device goes down, or

when the network itself goes down, it's a big problem for you.

So, power outages in general are a big problem

because all your devices are going down.

I mean their charges are gonna die even if they're on battery.

But if your device goes down.

So for instance, If my phone, so this happens to my wife all the time.

She has a phone.

I won't say the brand.

She has a popular phone.

When she gets an update on her phone,

like she just recently got an update on her phone.

The thing just hangs up.

Regularly. Just yesterday, she's talking to me and

suddenly it hangs up.

She talks to me again.

It hangs up for no reason, right.

Because the update that was supposed to improve her device.

So now, her being dependent on this device all the time,

when she gets an update and it goes wrong,

when there are bugs in the software, it's a much more serious problem.

And buggy software is always a problem on a desktop,

say, but when it's something that you use a lot.

For instance, if it's a life critical thing,

like we talked about insulin pumps a couple of lectures back.

If that thing has a bug, that's a serious problem.

I mean, you can die off of that, right?

A pacemaker has a bug, there's a serious problem.

And these things actually happened in medical devices too,

that you've had these bugs and people have died.

We won't go into them, I don't have slides on these right now.

But there are devices that this has happened.

And the more these IoT devices get integrated into our lives,

the more dependent we are.

So when they go wrong, it's a much worse problem for us.

Privacy and Security.

So another property of these IoT devices is they are,

they're recording information.

They are observing us.

Now, presumably for our benefit.

But they are observing us a lot and they are pervasive, so everywhere.

So for instance, your cell phone.

That thing is observing your location.

If you have your location services on,

which most people have on because a lot of applications depend on those services.

You have that on, it is reported your GPS, your location at all times, and it can

easily be sending that data back to Apple or whoever, whoever your manufacture is.

And that happens all the time.

This type of data is being tracked by your phone, and

sent back to some central location.

Now maybe they're using it for good purposes, to help you.

Like having your location means that when you're looking for

a restaurant, you don't have to report your location, it just knows, and

it can tell you where all the nearby restaurants are.

So that can be beneficial.

But it is tracking you all the time.

Health monitors.

They're tracking your health information, right, all the time, and

sending them on a network to some cloud server.

So there's important information about your health

that is being transmitted over the network and stored in some remote server.

TV watching habits, media watching, whatever media you're watching.

That type of thing is.

So, say you've got a new TV, it can track,

in fact it typically records what you watch.

In fact, my DVR it flags, when I'm looking at the list of TV shows,

it flags which ones it thinks I'll want to watch.

Now, how does it figure that out?

It's tracking my activity, knows what type of shows I've watched in the past,

finds similar shows and suggest them to me.

So that's a benefit, right?

But just understand that it is tracking everything that you're watching

on your TV or your DVR, things like this.

Actually, we see this all the time with people must have interacted with this,

when you buy something online.

So, one thing I do is I build quad copters with my son.

We build quad copters, I have a research project on this, remote control, right?

Whenever I make purchase like a quad coptor purchase,

suddenly all the ads I see are for quad coptor parts.

Motors and RC controls and all this, and you must have interacted with this, right?

It's tracking what you're buying, and then just throwing ads at you.

It's doing it for marketing purposes, but

it's throwing ads at you according to things you've bought in the past.

So, purchasing habits, cellphone or whatever device you're purchasing on.

Say if your refrigerator's making purchases for you, food purchases for

you or something like that,

the fridge itself can track that data and give it to some third party.

Driving habits.

So, cars have lots of sensors, about the speed and

things like that, and if you're hitting the brake, something like that.

And car incident reporting, the insurance agencies can use that

when you're trying to get money back for your car.

So say you crash your car and you say, look, I was hitting the brake and

they say, well, the car says you weren't hitting the break.

So, you owe us this much money, right?

So that type of data is being recorded, sent to insurance agencies, and

they can use that against you.

So, data can be used to market to you.

I already mentioned this, but the ads that you see on your computer or

on your phone, those things happen, they pick ads, basically selectively,

based on what your purchase habits are.

So, if they know you're interested in buying a particular type of device,

you'll get ads related to that.

Health problems.

So, if they know you're on a certain type of drug, they'll give you ads for

related drugs for related issues, things like this.

So, that's probably the most popular use of this data is marketing, right?

Often you give

permission to the person you purchase the device from, you give them permission

to use that data in those long agreements that you click Okay to.

So when you buy a device, buy a phone, or put an application on your phone and

it says do you accept the agreement terms?

And you don't read that, but you click Okay.

So, in that, you are giving up all ownership of all data often.

Right? So all this data that's being tracked,

it can legally be given to some third party agency,

and then they can sell that data whenever they want to.

So, it's hard to keep track of your data.

You don't know who has your data,

because you agreed at some point to allow them to own that data.

Oh, insurance agencies.

So, the car accidents, car insurance.

They can track the data about your car see how you were driving at the time of

the accident and use that information.

It could be used to your advantage.

They could say oh, you did hit the brakes, so it's not your fault.

Or they could say look, you didn't hit the brakes so it is your fault.

So, it can be used either way.

Also, undiagnosed health problems.

So this is a little creepy but this can certainly happen.

So, insurance agencies are basically statisticians.

They do statistics to determine health insurance.

How much they are gonna charge you, they do based on the state of your health.

So, they can predict what the state of your health will be based on

available data.

So for instance, say you've got Fitbit, and

Fitbit is recording data about your health.

How your heart rate and things like this.

That data can be used by an insurance agency to

figure out how much they wanna charge you.

They can say look, based on your health right now,

we can predict that in a few years, you might come down with this disease and so

we're gonna charge you more.

So, this type of information is very

useful to different agencies in different ways.

And you should be aware that while these IoT devices are beneficial to you,

they are storing data and that data may or may not be in your control.

Security's another thing.

Often this data is held in the cloud somewhere.

So say FitBit, it tracks your data, it sends it to some cloud servers.

Now, this is medical information and you would like it to remain private.

And they maybe try to keep it private, but there are hackers.

There are people who steal data, and you must have heard about this in the news.

And so, the data can be attacked at the cloud server, and

it's out of your control.

So if that data isn't maintained in a secure way.

So, what we're showing over here is basically

a rough picture of an encryption algorithm.

But the idea is that data would need to be encrypted.

If it's private data,

health data, you'd like that to be encrypted on the cloud server.

But you as a user don't have any control, direct control over

whether encryption is being used, or maybe it's not being used consistently.

You can't control that directly, right?

That's up to the cloud server.

So you are left to trust them to take care of your data, and

often these agencies are not trustworthy.

I don't want to name names, but if you've heard about any hacks about

particular companies having their databases stolen.

And it's happened many times over the last few months or the last few years,

that data isn't being held in a secure way and then your private data's stolen.

So this can happen.

Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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