NOVEMBER - 2021CONSTRUCTIONTECHREVIEW.COM9and organize, and not always for altruistic purposes. A building owner may think they own their data but that may not be the case.Another significant issue is the security of these devices.While we may be in an age of IoT where there are many mature players who have developed, often through trial and error, robust IoT devices that can be effectively placed in a built environment, there are still many newcomers rushing to market, lacking in experience, or with not-so-great intentions producing IoT products that open vulnerabilities to the bad actors or self-induced catastrophes. These can include weak, bad, or hardcoded passwords; in-secure or unneeded network services; insecure edge devices; outdated firmware, hardware, or software, and many other security holes.Smart solutions with an intelligent building or complex being designed and built must take into account not just these vulnerabilities within the systems designed into the buildings, but also must look at the transient devices that are IoT connected to protect from failure points.This is often one of the biggest tasks overlooked by owners, occupants, and the design and construction teams where blinders are worn to anything that isn't attached to the building.This opens up the project for failure points and secu-rity vulnerabilities.Current generations of devices have limited intelligence at the edge mainly due to lack of com-puting power and storage, however, that continues to change at an exponential pace.This is mainly a factor that on-demand information requirements are changing and latency of processing in the cloud slows things down.So as these edge devices improve, vulnerabilities could increase more than there are today and transient devices that may connect to a building's edge topography will cause headaches down the line.Blockchain technology, as is used in Bitcoin transactions, has been continuing to make inroads in the IoT world and has the promise to advance security but this needs to be coupled with a thorough threat assessment beyond the boundaries of the proj-ect in addition to the actual architecture of a projects IoT solution. Other security features continue to be developed and integrated but until the IoT industry truly aligns and overseeing authorities place limits on what is acceptable IoT will continue to be a wild west As networks, storage, and IoT devices have improved, we have moved from an Internet where people were the primary client/customer, and the data generated by them and was analyzed after the factRaymond Kent
< Page 8 | Page 10 >