Identity of Smart Things

At last week’s NVTC Cybersecurity Committee, Andrew Girson, Dan Caprio, Joe Klein and I were on a panel, and we explained how shift happens when we place our Trust in smart things. IoT is now ubiquitous.

IoT access is replacing mobile access just as mobile access replaced web access over a decade ago.

Gestures are replacing logins and swipes are superseding passwords in the modern user experience surrounded by smart things. Earlier at this year’s Live Slam '17 Internet of Things conference we witnessed how progressive is the shift to IoT with Amazon, GE, IBM and others are racing to connect the dots. As the current population of 5 billion smart phones are steadily outnumbering the world population of 7 billion human beings, imagine how quickly would trillions of smart things surpass the human population.

In today’s era of password-less economy, basic user identity capabilities – authentication, authorization, attribution is undergoing a shift from user interaction standpoint.

A simple step of logging in is enhanced by adding gesture-based preambles. Similarly, authentication schemes for federated single sign-on experience is expanded via multiple layers of authentication to ensure you are really you in the context of myriad devices and apps. For instance, direct authentication is used to involve a pin, a password, a fingerprint and often a KBA (knowledge-based authentication). Nowadays, there are indirect authentication methods that involve keys, tokens and one-time passwords. Add to it, the notion of continuous authentication that strengthen the method via voice prints, facial scans, lexical keystrokes, and even walking gaits. Lastly but not the least, there is the notion of contextual authentication that factors in behavioral statistics, session cookies, IP address and time of the day before granting compliant and secure access to the user.  

Welcome to the era of smart things.