How big is the Internet of Things? In 2012, census-taking bots found 1.3 billion addresses in use by devices around the world. But more important than that now-outdated figure is what the ability of those bots to take the census tells us about Internet security.
As related by Philip N. Howard at Brookings, an anonymous programmer created a bot that enlisted unprotected devices as other bots, forming a census-taking botnet called Carna Botnet. The anonymous programmer’s intentions were benign, but Carna Botnet encountered many other bots—including a network of bots called Aidra—whose intentions may have been malicious and who could take over devices simply by knowing factory-default passwords. Carna Botnet took the liberty of disabling any Aidra bots it encountered.
As for the size of the IoT itself, Howard notes that the 2012 census counted only devices with IPv4 addresses. As for the present, he writes, “There are over 30 different sources—from full on commissioned research reports to vague press releases—about how the Internet of Things is growing. It is hard to get a consistent punchline from all the different ways of counting the Internet of Things….”
He includes an interesting plot that you can view here showing the number of Internet-connected devices superimposed on the world population—the curves crossed in 2014. Estimates going forward from 2015 are laden with assumptions or are simply aspirational, Howard says. Nevertheless, Gartner has forecast an installed base of 25 billion by 2020, and, Howard writes, the industry treats estimates of 50 billion connections as credible.
We may or may not see trillion-sensor networks in the near future. Nevertheless, concludes Howard, “It is worthwhile and fun to track the increasingly aggressive predictions that come from analysts. If there is going to be some public policy guidance on the openness and interoperability of the IoT, now is the time to craft it.”
