Dr Michael J. Covington

Michael J. Covington, Ph.D. is the product manager for Cisco's Security Intelligence Operations; he is focused on delivering technologies that monitor emerging threats and deliver actionable intelligence to next-generation networks and platforms.

As a security researcher with eight patents pending and as the author of numerous papers that have been published in leading academic conferences and journals, Dr Covington’s research has explored formal access control modeling, cutting edge authentication techniques, and security approaches for pervasive computing environments. He is interested in bringing more intelligent systems to market that can assist with security-relevant decision-making, policy enforcement, and investigation efforts.

Dr Covington received his Ph.D. and MSCS degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing in Atlanta, Georgia. He also holds a B.S. degree from Mount Saint Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Threat Implications of the Internet of Things
There are currently more objects connected to the Internet than there are people in the world. This gap will continue to grow, as more objects gain the ability to directly interface with the Internet or become physical representations of data accessible via Internet systems. This trend toward greater independent object interaction in the Internet is collectively described as the Internet of Things.

As with previous global technology trends, such as widespread mobile adoption and datacentre consolidation, the changing operating environment associated with the Internet of Things represents considerable impact to the attack surface and threat environment of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.  In this talk, we will discuss the security and privacy implications of the Internet of Things.

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