"Let's have certifications!" is a common answer, but the mechanics are non-trivial. Flip the question around from it's usual perspective... suppose you are a certification authority. Put your business hat on. What would it take for you to be willing to certify a non-trivial product as being secure? Bear in mind that the act of certification puts your skin in the game; if you certify things that subsequently have flaws in them, you will at the very least suffer a reputation hit, and it's not out of the question you'll get caught in the lawsuit and monetary damages crossfire. So... what would it take for you to be willing to sign off on an IP camera?
Being honest with yourself, would you have certified something as secure if it used OpenSSL correctly (assuming such a unicorn could exist), before you knew about Heartbleed? If your answer is no, what would it take for you to be willing to certify something using SSL? (I assume "not using SSL" is an obvious certification black mark.)
What I mean by "put your business hat on" is that I am not trying to make the point that this is impossible. I don't think it is. What I mean is, think business, think risk, think risk management, think about how your business is basically made out of black swan events, think about what it would take for you to put yourself out like that, and put some real numbers on the money and at least mentally come up with a sketch of what it would take.
Speaking for myself, it doesn't take me long before I notice that my certification standards would simply annihilate the entire IoT industry as it now stands, on even basic stuff like "Since you're using C, are you using best-practices static analysis? Can you update your firmwares? How secure is your firmware update process?" Those three questions alone and I've probably tipped nearly the entire industry into a negative cost/benefits analysis. Does that solve the problem? Again, I mean that question more honestly than it probably sounds on the Internet; a case can be made that an industry that is currently basically only able to survive by extensive offloading of what become negative externalities really shouldn't exist, even in a bootstrap phase. Perhaps nuking the industry as it now stands is the best thing we could do in the next couple of years. Pour encourager les autres if for no other reason. Let the industry come up with some best practices, form some "sell shovels rather than dig for gold" companies around building more secure IoT platforms, come back at the problem after that.
A real certification process that really solves this problem is probably unsustainably expensive for the industry as we now know it, xor the certification will be a useless rubber stamp that doesn't solve the problem.
See but I think that's great stuff to consider. If we can't actually make things that are both cost-effective and safe to the public, I'd say those things should not be made and sold to the public.
Maybe it slows down the progress of the industry, but if that progress comes at a price all of us are paying (through the currently-unaddressed externality of shitty code enabling DDOSes around the world), I think that is progress that should be slowed down.
I certainly don't want to wake up one day and find that my employer's sites are gone, and their business (and my livelihood, and my home and family's security) threatened because rando manufacturer X's IoT cameras have taken out a data center for lulz. So..regulate? Bring it on.
Being honest with yourself, would you have certified something as secure if it used OpenSSL correctly (assuming such a unicorn could exist), before you knew about Heartbleed? If your answer is no, what would it take for you to be willing to certify something using SSL? (I assume "not using SSL" is an obvious certification black mark.)
What I mean by "put your business hat on" is that I am not trying to make the point that this is impossible. I don't think it is. What I mean is, think business, think risk, think risk management, think about how your business is basically made out of black swan events, think about what it would take for you to put yourself out like that, and put some real numbers on the money and at least mentally come up with a sketch of what it would take.
Speaking for myself, it doesn't take me long before I notice that my certification standards would simply annihilate the entire IoT industry as it now stands, on even basic stuff like "Since you're using C, are you using best-practices static analysis? Can you update your firmwares? How secure is your firmware update process?" Those three questions alone and I've probably tipped nearly the entire industry into a negative cost/benefits analysis. Does that solve the problem? Again, I mean that question more honestly than it probably sounds on the Internet; a case can be made that an industry that is currently basically only able to survive by extensive offloading of what become negative externalities really shouldn't exist, even in a bootstrap phase. Perhaps nuking the industry as it now stands is the best thing we could do in the next couple of years. Pour encourager les autres if for no other reason. Let the industry come up with some best practices, form some "sell shovels rather than dig for gold" companies around building more secure IoT platforms, come back at the problem after that.
A real certification process that really solves this problem is probably unsustainably expensive for the industry as we now know it, xor the certification will be a useless rubber stamp that doesn't solve the problem.