Let's Talk About Networks Of Things, Baby. Let's Talk About You And Me.

It is easy to see networks all around us. The printers at the office, your child's videogame, the food ordering app on your phone, the fitness band or smart watch on your wrist, the electricity grid for your city, the self-driving cars being tested on our roads, all rely at least in part on networked solutions. The ubiquity of networks is already staggering and the pace of research and development in this area is poised to increase for years to come. As the things in our world get smarter and the network of these smart things grows larger, a little-known agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce, the National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST" or "Agency"), decided it was time that stakeholders smartened up about the way they discuss networks, connected "smart" things, and the privacy and security challenges associated with them.

The Agency recently released NIST Special Publication 800-183 ("Publication") designed to offer a vocabulary and intellectual framework for thinking about Networks of Things ("NoT's"). To be clear, if the "smart" things being discussed are somehow connected to the Internet, you might hear someone refer to the Internet of Things ("IoT") when describing this web-enabled NoT. Our references to NoT's in this blog post are meant to capture both concepts.

The bulk of the Publication is focused on describing what NIST calls the five basic building blocks of NoT's or the "primitives":

Sensor: an electronic tool that measures physical properties and generates data; Aggregator: a software tool that aggregates raw data from the sensor; Communications channel: a medium that transmits raw data or aggregated data; eUtility: a piece of software or hardware that receives and processes aggregated data; and Decision Trigger: a mechanism that creates results in line with the purpose of the network. The primitives are useful as a conceptual tool because they broadly apply to all NoT's and can facilitate precise and actionable discussion about network vulnerabilities and threats. "The vocabulary and science of the Network of Things," said Jeffrey Voas, an NIST computer scientist and author of the publication, "will help researchers understand how the components of IoT interoperate, and compare the security risks and reliability tradeoffs."

For example, a developer considering the adoption of automated temperature controls for its buildings will need to consider sensor and aggregator security to understand if an attacker...