SECURITY, A MAJOR THREAT TO INTERNET OF THINGS Date:   Monday , November 24, 2014 Headquartered in Hopkinton, EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) offers data storage, information secutiry, virtualization, and other services. The company has a current market cap of $57.58 billion. Internet of things has gained immense popularity in the modern wireless world. The strength of the IoT is the potential impact it will have on several aspects of mundane life and the behavior of potential users as well as the business users. In the Internet of Things (IoT) model, many of the objects that surround us will be on the network in one form or another. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and sensor network technologies will increase to meet the new challenge, in which information and communication systems are imperceptibly embedded in the environment. Smart connectivity with current networks and context-aware reckoning using network assets is an essential part of IoT. With the growing presence of WiFi and 4G-LTE wireless Internet access, the development towards ubiquitous information and communication networks is already apparent. According to an updated market forecast from ABI Research, the installed base of active wireless connected devices will exceed 16 billion in 2014, about 20 percent more than in 2013. The number of devices will be more than double from the current level, with 40.9 billion forecasted for 2020. However, for the Internet of Things vision to successfully emerge, the computing paradigm will need to go beyond traditional mobile computing scenarios that use smart phones and portables, and evolve into connecting everyday existing objects and embedding intelligence into our environment. In order to understand the viability and applicability of this distributed approach, it is necessary to explicitly know its actual features and major principles, including the benefits and disadvantages. Also, as security and privacy are important factors that will influence the adoption of the IoT paradigm. It is essential to know what are the security and privacy challenges � and benefits � of the distributed approach, and what are the most promising approaches in this field. If the challenges are too difficult and the benefits are less, it might make sense to focus mainly on the centralized approach for IoT deployments. The IoT is extremely prone to the following reasons 1. Its components spend most of the time unattended; and thus, it is easy to physically attack them 2. Wireless communications makes spying simple Most of the IoT components are characterized by low capabilities in terms of both energy and computing resources (this is especially the case for passive components) and thus, they cannot implement complex schemes supporting security. There is a substantial body of work that analyzes the existing challenges and possible protection mechanisms. The major challenges that must be overcome in order to push the Internet of Things into the real world is security. IoT architectures are supposed to deal with an estimated population of billions of objects, which will interact with each other and with other entities, such as human beings or virtual entities. And all these interactions must be secured somehow, protecting the information and service provisioning. The number of attack vectors available to malicious attackers might become staggering, as global connectivity (\'access anyone\') and accessibility (access anyhow, anytime) are key tenets of the IoT. The threats that can affect the IoT entities are numerous, such as attacks that target diverse communication channels, physical threats, denial of service, identity fabrication, and others. Few of the challenges mentioned earlier along with security mechanism should be integrated with IoT. They are: 1. Heterogeneity has a great influence over the protocol and network security services that must be implemented in the IoT 2. Heterogeneous objects also affect identity management. Beyond defining the actual scope of \'identity\' in this context (e.g. underlying identity vs. real identity, core identity vs. temporary identity), we also need to provide some mechanisms for achieving universal authentication 3. The data deluge caused by billions of entities creating information is a big threat to privacy. Users must have tools that allow them to retain their anonymity in this super connected world 4. The size and heterogeneity of the IoT also affects its trust and control 5. The number of weak systems and attacks paths will surely increase in the context of the IoT, thus fault tolerance becomes crucial. The distributed approach of Internet of Things has numerous security challenges. The challenges that must be solved are assuring interoperability, reaching a business model, and managing the authentication and authorization of entities. Still, there are multiple benefits as well. Since intelligence is not concentrated on a limited set of centralized application platforms � although these platforms can also exist in order to provide additional support � scalability is improved. Future IoT infrastructures will aim at supporting the on-going creation of IoT applications which will utilize data and services from many different device platforms, locations and environments. New decentralized management mechanisms are required to allow for efficient exploitation of the underlying devices overcoming the inefficiencies of centralized approaches when dealing with a huge number of devices. Storage and compute growth will be phenomenal way of growth.