Currently I play with IoT devices and connected “things”, and as much they fascinate me, mostly they are quite locked and when the vendor loses interest, money or disappears from the market, these things mutate to ubiquitous threads and begin to scare me.
Sure, most of the stuff is built on Linux, but passwords or access is blocked and if there is no merciful vendor that takes care of automated updates they rot and become vulnerable.
Additionally, sometimes even the communication protocols are unknown, insecure and create a lock-in to the original vendor and its “intellectual property”.
In an ideal world there will be an Open Source based software stack that is capable of a standard based communication, secured connection with controlled data flow and ways to manage the zillions of devices connected to and managed by the central management.
And, although the world is not perfect, something like this seems to exist: In the Eclipse community, there is the IoT Community!
I specifically looked into the IoT device middleware Kura and the cloud based management platform Kapua.
With these tools and a secure MQTT based communication, an Open Source, standards based IoT stack can created:
This not pure academic stuff, but real code! Interesting companies like Eurotech, Bosch and my employer Red Hat are investing into these projects.
My goal in the coming weeks will be to look deeper into these projects, make them available in an on-premise installation and have a lot of fun. And yes, I will write about that here. So stay tuned.
