As the Internet of Things becomes a ubiquitous idea and a fact of life, what happens to all the aging and increasingly insecure Things? According to Wired’s Robert Mcmillan, responding to a recent question on the security of IoT from Dan Geer, this may be a serious problem [1][2]. The solution, Mcmillan suggests, is to design these devices with an expiration date. In other words: they need to be programmed to die.
The problem may not be too severe now, but the future of the Internet of Things will look different than it does now. Security will likely loosen, because software will be a part of everything, and it tends to be the case that things mass produced to that degree experience a bit of a drop in quality. That, Mcmillan argues, presents a problem:
