On April 18th 1906, an earthquake and fires destroyed nearly three quarters of San Francisco. Around 3000 people lost their lives. Right up to the present many other, less critical tremors followed. The danger of another catastrophe can’t be ignored. In a city like San Francisco, however wonderful it might be to live there, people always have to be aware that their whole world can change in an instant. Now the Internet of Things (IoT) can help to make alarm systems get better. People in this awesome city can at least be sure that the mayor and his office staff do their best to keep them safe and secure in all aspects.
Not only that: With the help of the Internet of Things (IoT) they’re also looking for new ways to make the life of the citizens more convenient. That became clear to me when I saw ForgeRock’s presentation about their IoT and Identity projects in San Francisco. I noticed with pleasure that Lasse Andresen, ForgeRock’s CTO and Founder confirmed what I have been saying for quite some time: Security and Privacy must not be an afterthought. Rightfully designed from the start, both do not hinder new successful business models but actually enable them. In IoT, security and privacy are integral elements. They lead to more agility and less risk.
Andresen says in the presentation that Identity, Security and Privacy are core to IoT: “It’s kind of what makes IoT work or not work. Or making big data valuable or not valuable.” San Francisco is an absolutely great example of what that means in practice. Everything – “every thing” - in this huge city shall have its own unique identity, from the utility meter to the traffic lights and parking spaces to the police, firefighters and ambulance. This allows fast, secure and ordered action in case of emergencies. Because of their identities and with geolocation, the current position of each vehicle is always exactly known to the emergency coordinators. The firefighters identify themselves with digital key cards at the scene to show that they are authorized to be there. Thus everything and everyone becomes connected with each other, people, things and services. With identity as the glue.
Identity information enables business models that e. g. improve life in the city. The ForgeRock demonstration shows promising examples such as optimizing the traffic flow and road planning with big data, street lights that reduce power consumption by turning on and off automatically, smart parking that allows the car driver to reserve a space online in advance combined with demand based pricing of parking spaces and, last but not least, live-optimization of service routes.
The ForgeRock solution matches the attributes and characteristics of human users to those of things, devices, and apps, collects the notifications all together in a big data repository and then flexibly manages the relationships between all entities - people and things - from this central authoritative source. Depending on her or his role, each different user will be carefully provisioned with access to certain devices as well as certain rights and privileges. That is why identity is a prerequisite for secure relationships. Things are just another channel demanding access to the internet. It has to be clear what they are allowed to do, e. g. may item A send sensitive data to a certain server B? If so, does the information have to be encrypted? Without the concept of identities, their relations, and for managing their access there are too many hindrances for successful change in business models and regulations.
Besides the questions about security and privacy, the lack of standards has long been the biggest challenge for full-functioning IoT. Manifold platforms, various protocols and many different APIs made overall integration of IoT systems problematic. Yes, there are even many different “standards”. However, with User Managed Access (UMA) a new standard eventually evolved that’s taking care of the management of access rights. With UMA, millions of users can manage their own access rights and keep full control over their own data without giving it to the service provider. They alone decide which information they share with others. While the resources may be stored on several different servers, a central authorization server controls that the rules laid down by the owner are being reliably applied. Any enterprise that adapts UMA early now has the chance to build a new, strong and long-lasting relationship with customers built on security and privacy by design.