New-Tech Europe | March 2019

Accelerate cellular IoT adoption by balancing security with power efficiency.

Juniper Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) may be disrupting the world economy, but security remains a sticking point. Low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks carrying IoT data from devices such as water meters and smoke detectors are particularly challenged by the heavy processing that security typically entails. The good news is that technical standards nearing ratification will soon start protecting these devices in efficient new ways using algorithms already built into the cellular network. An emerging security standard called BEST1 conserves battery life while securing IoT data. The 3GPP, the international body in charge of mobile broadband standards development, is overseeing BEST, which applies to IoT services carried across licensed mobile frequencies. BEST is especially suited to applications using sensors that rely

on batteries as a power source, such as smart metering, asset management, and environmental monitoring. Most business plans associated with these high-volume IoT deployments call for using low-cost batteries with very long lives—10 years or more—to avoid the expense and interruption of having to continually replace them. The typical security process, though, involves overhead- heavy, certificate-based mutual authentication and complicated Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) management, which quickly consume battery power. Because of this complexity and overhead, it can be tempting to forego security when implementing IoT applications in order to conserve battery life. Can You Trust the Data? However, IoT data that hasn’t been

secured is untrusted data. And data you can’t trust is useless at best. For example, if you have no confidence that your water meter reading is accurate, why bother collecting it? At worst, untrusted data can be damaging. If a heart monitor’s data has been manipulated, someone’s health may be put at risk. The BEST standard introduces a way to get the best of both worlds: low-power battery-operated devices with long lives and robust security. In this way, BEST represents a significant turning point in IoT. Companies plan to spend US$15 trillion globally in aggregate IoT investment between 2017 and 2025, according to BI Intelligence2. If IoT isn’t secure, those investments could be in jeopardy. In fact, Nemertes Research3 reports that while IoT figures prominently in most companies’ digital transformation

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