5 Challenges and barriers of IoT
5.2 Barriers

But there are also existing barriers for the IoT, especially in the field of regulations, security and safety. Main goal is to better protect the privacy of people and force companies to establish secure ways to manage data and information [8, 9].

Absence of Governance

One major barrier for the widespread adoption of the Internet of Things technology is the absence of governance. Without an impartial governing authority it will be impossible to have a truly global IoT, accepted by states, companies, trade organizations and the common people. Today there is not a unique universal numbering scheme: EPCglobal and the Ubiquitous Networking Lab propose two different, non-compatible ways of identifying objects and there is the risk to have them competing in the coming future over the global market. There is also the need of keeping governance as generic as possible, as having one authority per application field will certainly lead to overlap, confusion and competition between standards. Objects can have different identities in different contexts so having multiple authorities would create a kind of multi-homing, which can lead to disastrous results.

Privacy and Security

In order to have a widespread adoption of any object identification system, there is a need to have a technically sound solution to guarantee privacy and the security of the customers. While in many cases the security has been done as an add-on feature, it is the feeling that the public acceptance for the Internet of Things will happen only when the strong security and privacy solutions are in place. In particular, attacks have to be intercepted, data authenticated, access controlled and the privacy of customers (natural and legal persons) guaranteed. This could be hybrid security mechanisms that for example combine hardware security with key diversification to deliver superior security that makes attacks significantly more difficult or even impossible. The selection of security features and mechanisms will continue to be determined by the impact on business processes; and trade-offs will be made between chip size, cost, functionality, interoperability, security, and privacy.

The security and privacy issues should be addressed by the forthcoming standards which must define different security features to provide confidentiality, integrity, or availability services.

There are also a range of issues related to the identity of people. These must be dealt with in politics and legislation, and they are of crucial importance for the efficient public administrations of the future.