Smart Cities and IoT: with opportunity comes risk

Smart Cities and the area sometimes called the Internet of Things is fostering collection of data related to many aspects of commerce, health, environment, and transportation.

IoT is going to generate way more data than we have today. Even a tiny device can generate a lot of data. And we will have lots of devices.

Tiny devices aren’t going to hold data for long. The devices will forward data to Internet connected data centers. Ultimately this will drive demand for cloud hosted analytics that can access pools of this data, using results to influence and control many aspects of society.

It will drive control loops for commerce, transportation, and public safety - and become a target for mischief, criminals, and terrorists. It will be important that the system is highly available and protected from tampering

Miscreants aren’t the only threat. Open flow of information, sometimes threatens dysfunctional or totalitarian governments.

Incidents such as the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Flint, Michigan water contamination show that independent data sources have great value, but that insiders sometimes have temptations to destroy or tamper with the free flow of reliable data. 

This talk will focus on the need for an architecture that keeps IoT data streams trustworthy and highly available. A few historical precedents related to this problem will be cited, along with a proposed solution.

Note: Steve Wong will deliver this talk, as a citizen representing his personal viewpoint. He is not acting as a spokesman for his employer Dell Technologies. Steve was formerly on the founding engineering team for Wonderware, an industrial control and SCADA software product with over 700K installations. Steve designed the data collection protocol for this product.