As Brian Krebs is discovering, a large number of internet-connected devices with bad security can really ruin your day. Therefore, a lot of energy is being spent thinking about how to solve the security problems of the Internet of Things. Most of it is focussed on how we can make sure that these devices get regular security updates, and how to align the incentives to achieve that. And it’s difficult, because cheap IoT devices are cheap, and manufacturers make more money building the next thing than fixing the previous one.

Perhaps, instead, of trying to make water flow uphill, we should be taking a different approach. How can we design these devices such that they don’t need any security updates for their lifetime?

One option would be to make them perfect first time. Yeah, right.

Another option would be the one from my blog post, An IoT Vision. In that post, I outlined a world where IoT devices’ access to the Internet is always mediated through a hub. This has several advantages, including the ability to inspect all traffic and the ability to write open source drivers to control the hardware. But one additional outworking of this design decision is that the devices are not Internet-addressable, and cannot send packets directly to the Internet on their own account. If that’s so, it’s much harder to compromise them and much harder to do anything evil with them if you do. At least, evil things affecting the rest of the net. And if that’s not sufficient, the hub itself can be patched to forbid patterns of access necessary for attacks.

Can we fix IoT security not by making devices secure, but by hiding them from attacks?