IP-enabled devices: Why Not Forgo Encryption and Authentication?

IP-enabled devices provide convenience to users by allowing a device to connect directly to a network. Smart home automation devices may allow a user to use their device to turn on the lights, ring a doorbell, control their thermostat, or monitor their home via security cameras. Lateral movement attacks allow a dangerous hacker to exploit vulnerabilities in insecure smart home automation devices and allow them to move laterally within your network. While Encryption and Authentication may prevent a quick, convenient setup, every insecure device that sits on a network significantly increases the risk that a hacker will gain access to sensitive data and private servers. IP-enabled devices operate over simple ethernet, Wi-Fi, TCP, and internet protocols. The data is transmitted via clear text, which allows dangerous hackers to use WireShark to view the clear text transmitted data and intercept your system. A hacker could easily discover the device using a Python script and use a tool like NMAP to discover the open ports that can be exploited.


Internet of Things and home automation devices require secure communication over HTTPS. While microprocessors that run these services require regular maintenance, such as upgrading SSL certificate fingerprints, every year, providing secure maintenance is a high-risk activity that could result in a device being locked out of communication with otherwise authorized servers. 


Technology undeniably pushes society to advance in powerful ways; however, device creators have an ethical responsibility to educate their users on protecting their networks from exploitation. Many users are unaware that they should go to their wireless security settings to enable encryption. Strong passwords and two-step authentication seem like a hassle to the everyday user that struggles to simply get the device up and running. We live in a society where instant gratification often becomes more important than long-term success. Companies must strive to meet the demands of an ever-changing market built on user convenience while also ensuring that the devices they create do not create vulnerabilities that unintentionally harm the user.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SalonAboutBeauty: Less Integration for Consistent Styling Across Components

Ensuring Consistent Variables Less provides several advantages for organizing CSS to ensure consistency across a website. The variables.less file defines reusable properties that allow a developer to easily communicate and maintain styles according to a style guide or theme.  The Less Web Development Cookbook describes properties in the variables.less file in relation to other programming languages: “Variables in Less are defined as the equivalent to statics in other programming languages. You assign a value to a variable once and use it everywhere in your code” (Meyghani & Jobsen, 2015, p. 50). It suggests that less allows a developer to set properties, such as colors and length, to variable names that retain their meaning and can be used everywhere in the code. Examples: @base-color: red, @primary: green.  By providing these definitions in a central location, developers create code consistency in all areas of the website. Creating an Organized File St...
Read more

Why “Human Error” Is Usually a System Design Problem

In complex systems, failure rarely comes from a single bad decision. It comes from problems that evolve slowly, cross boundaries, and remain unresolved while everyone involved behaves reasonably. Managing risk in these environments means managing trajectories, not just incidents. When ownership is divided strictly by role, function, or severity threshold, gaps are inevitable. Those gaps are where issues linger, age, and quietly accumulate risk, not because they were ignored, but because no one was responsible for carrying them forward end to end. This is common in healthcare, where delay is often necessary. A patient may require observation, referrals, or time to clarify diagnosis. The failure is not that care takes time; it is that the trajectory of care becomes fragmented. Each clinician escalates correctly within scope, yet no one owns the evolving picture across visits, domains, and decisions. The patient is evaluated repeatedly, reassured locally, and sent away without continuity ...
Read more

Challenges in Prosecuting Deep Web and Darknet Crimes: The Case of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road

  The deep web represents online information that is not easily accessible through search engines. Prosecuting crimes on the deep web is no more challenging than prosecuting crimes for any standard website because law enforcement can still track the user's location through a domain or IP address. Alternately, the darknet poses a challenge for law enforcement to address illicit activity because while the darknet is a web-based system, it is accessible only through the Tor protocol that encapsulates HTTP and HTTPS traffic, much like a VPN that hides a user’s location and identity. The Tor protocol, often called the Onion Router, contains methods for encrypting and routing traffic between peers. The purpose of the Tor protocol is to make web browsing anonymous by routing each request through multiple peers and altering encryption at various steps until the request reaches its destination. Subsequent requests may hop through different peers, making traffic appear random, unpredictable,...
Read more