Securing the Internet of Things Infrastructure - Standards and Techniques

The Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure is a conglomerate of electronic devices interconnected through the Internet, with the purpose of providing prompt and effective service to end-users. Applications running on an IoT infrastructure generally handle sensitive information such as a patient’s healthcare record, the position of a logistic vehicle, or the temperature readings obtained through wireless sensor nodes deployed in a bushland. The protection of such information from unlawful disclosure, tampering or modification, as well as the unscathed presence of IoT devices, in adversarial environments, is of prime concern. In this paper, a descriptive analysis of the security of standards and technologies for protecting the IoT communication channel from adversarial threats is provided. In addition, two paradigms for securing the IoT infrastructure, namely, common key based and paired key based, are proposed

The Internet of Hackable Things

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education

Approach to Assessing the Preparedness of Hospitals to Power Outages

Within the secondary impacts of electricity blackouts, it is necessary to pay attention to facilities providing medical care for the population, namely the hospitals. Hospitals represent a key position in the provision of health care also in times of crisis. These facilities must provide constant care; it is therefore essential that the preparedness of such facilities is kept at a high level. The basic aim of this article is to analyse the preparedness of hospitals to power outages (power failures, blackouts) within a pilot study. On that basis, a SWOT analysis is used to determine strengths and weaknesses of the system of preparedness of hospitals to power outages and solutions for better security of hospitals are defined. The sample investigated consists of four hospitals founded by the Regional Authority (hospitals Nos. 1-4) and one hospital founded by the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic (hospital No. 5). The results of the study shows that most weaknesses of the preparedness of hospitals are represented by inadequately addressed reserves of fuel for the main backup power supply, poor knowledge of employees who are insufficiently retrained, and old backup power supplies (even 35 years in some cases)

Mechatronics & the cloud

Conventionally, the engineering design process has assumed that the design team is able to exercise control over all elements of the design, either directly or indirectly in the case of sub-systems through their specifications. The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that a design team’s ability to have control over all elements of a system is no longer the case, particularly as the actual system configuration may well be being dynamically reconfigured in real-time according to user (and vendor) context and need. Additionally, the integration of the Internet of Things with elements of Big Data means that information becomes a commodity to be autonomously traded by and between systems, again according to context and need, all of which has implications for the privacy of system users. The paper therefore considers the relationship between mechatronics and cloud-basedtechnologies in relation to issues such as the distribution of functionality and user privacy