Is TechCrunch's definition of "IoT 2.0" significantly different to current best practices?

Question

TechCrunch recently ran an article on the "Internet of Things 2.0", and seem to say that it will be a major architectural change from what currently goes on.

Some examples of what they consider "IoT 2.0":

• “Most IoT devices will require a non-interactive method to login, so the use of cryptographic materials such as certificates and private keys becomes ever more necessary,”

• "One of the key characteristics of the IoT 2.0 will be common standards. The IoT umbrella is vast, and the many industries it covers – from factories and automotive through to building automation and networking – each have their own protocols, interfaces and hardware."

They also say:

It might be five years distant, but IoT 2.0 is on its way, with device miniaturisation, better power efficiency and connectivity, more sophisticated system architectures, and new machine learning algorithms all in the pipeline. Says Tcherevik: “IoT 2.0 is all but inevitable.”

However, some of the points made there already seem to be considered good practice, so it seem to me that their idea of an "IoT 2.0" is mostly just confusing and not very valuable.

Is there anything I'm missing, or does the article just bundle together current best practices and call it "IoT 2.0"?

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^{Obviously, it's difficult to speculate on what the future actually will hold, so I don't expect to discuss what could happen, rather: aren't most of the things mentioned already possible, just not adopted for cost-saving/complexity reasons?}

Answer 1

There is a big difference between current best practice, what is practical to implement at a sensible cost today, and the products designed in the past few years.

Not too long ago, we saw bluetooth locks appear, kickstarter style, as much as a proof of concept as anything else. As I remember, none were anything other than trivially insecure - but they were useful to explore the possibilities. As always, it will take a couple of product iterations to close out the less obvious holes.

The realities of a standardised platform are not quite here. As a recent question identified, a good, standardised, secure firmware-over-the-air platform is yet to emerge. The MCU devices in production do support this now (banked flash, etc). There are several possibilities, but may developers would need to start some research before implementing something today.

On cryptography, the larger endpoint devices are capable today (phone CPUs with signed bootloaders and strong isolation between secure code and applications are not new), but there is less choice at the low end.

As the article identifies, there is no big step change coming. It will take a while for all of today's best practices to become ubiquitous.

Pervasive connectivity is not here yet either - Cambridge only just rolled out a development LoRa network (for researchers). Suitable technology exists, but it's not as available as (for example) assuming nearly every home has better than 200kbps broadband upload capability (contrast now to 5 or 10 years ago).