AT&T has made their official stance on security in the Internet of Things known, and according to AT&T’s big data president, Victor Nilson, their view, like many others in the tech and networking worlds, is that it is absolutely crucial. The Internet of Things, by its nature, boasts a huge range of devices spanning all sorts of archetypes, and all of them must be completely secure in order to inspire the kind of consumer confidence that leads to a buyer using a device daily. Nilson asserted that the entire experience falls apart at the seams without a user trusting their devices. He went on to say that security in the IoT world consists mainly of authentication and encryption. Nilson also outlined AT&T’s own IoT security efforts, including AT&T NetBond, and Indigo.
NetBond is deceptively simple. A part of AT&T’s cloud-based AT&T Control Center, NetBond can forge a bond between a user’s preferred VPN and a number of cloud services out there, which means that a user can filter their entire connection, IoT and all, away from unknown and potentially unsafe servers. AT&T’s own Indigo IoT platform, on the other hand, is able to automate the process of filtering through customer information to see what is private and what can safely be given to third parties to enhance services. While it can be changed as desired, the default behavior is to hand over public, non-personal information as-is to any authorized entity that asks, while personal and private customer information such as location and credit card number are kept secure and offline.
AT&T also announced that their project to use the magnetic energy around power lines to guide high-speed spectrum and drive large volumes of data, known as AirGig, is currently being talked over with various power companies throughout the United States. The service will most likely pop up in the southern half of the US first, and presents the potential to serve high-speed data to rural areas that normally rely on satellite internet or old, slow DSL. The program is some ten years in the making, since AT&T conducted tests of such technology at one point, but ended up abandoning the project because millimeter wave technology presented itself as a better alternative at the time.