The Future Internet of Things and Security of its Control Systems

Introduction We consider the future of ICS cyber security. As best as we can see, much of this future unfolds in the context of the Internet of Things. In fact, we envision that all industrial and infrastructure environments, and cyber-physical systems in general, will take the form reminiscent of what today is referred to as the Internet of Things. Internet of Things is envisioned as multitude of heterogeneous devices densely interconnected and communicating with the objective of accomplishing a diverse range of objectives, often collaboratively. One can argue that in the relatively near future, the IoT construct will subsume industrial plants, infrastructures, housing and other systems that today are controlled by ICS and SCADA systems. The advent of IoT will be accompanied by a number of developments: miniaturization of devices and sensors, increasing mobility of devices, wearable devices, ubiquitous robotics and growing automation of all functions of IoT. Many of these devices will be smart sensor that contains a microprocessor that conditions the signals before transmission to the control network. Some of the devices are likely to be nano-robots with overall size of the order of a few micrometers or less in all spatial directions and constituted by nanoscopic components. IoT will be associated with great increase in automation. In addition to supporting highly autonomous devices, IoT itself will be self-organizing, self-configuring, and self-healing. The increase in automation may cause an increase in system vulnerability. With automation comes the necessity of reducing the need for manual intervention. Automated security monitoring will be essential as control systems grow large enough to exceed the capacity for humans to identify and process security logs and other security information. Other game-changing development may include radically new computing and networking paradigms. Emerging computing paradigms—nanocomputing, quantum computing, biologically or genome-based computing—might develop soon enough to make most current cybersecurity technologies obsolete, thus drastically changing the market. Quantum computing and networking are already fueling lively debate. Biologically inspired computation and communication paradigms will attract growing interest, especially as they offer promises for autonomous adaptation to previously unknown threats and even self-healing. In the IoT environments, cybersecurity will derive largely from system agility, moving-target defenses, cyber-maneuvering, and other autonomous or semi-autonomous behaviors. Cyber security of IoT may also benefit from new design methods for mixed-trusted systems; and from big data analytics— predictive and autonomous.