Lack of security could dampen IoT deployments

"We cannot have an IoT ecosystem without security we can trust," CA Technologies chief technology officer Otto Berkes told iTWire.

There have already been examples of cars being hacked (despite the 2014 warning from QUT professor Andry Rakotonirainy that this was a possibility), and the problem becomes even more serious as autonomous vehicles become an everyday reality.

The problem might be less spectacular in other areas, but that does not mean it is less significant Berkes said the issue would become even more important as the density of connected devices increases and the distance of control increases. The latter point refers to the situation where rather than one system — possibly with a human operator — giving instructions to a device, a device asks another to help perform a task, and that one asks another, and so on.

"In my mind, it's a form of distributed complexity," Berkes said. "We need to be confident that all communications are secure, and that the devices are reliable and act in a predefined way."