License 10: IoT Device Officer
The makers of vehicles for use on public roadways are very sensibly required to ensure that their products adhere to standards and to accept responsibility for the consequences of defects in the design and manufacture of those products.
Similarly, the manufacturers of devices that put packets of information onto the public information highway – the internet – should be required to ensure that their products adhere to standards and to accept responsibility for the consequences of defects in the design and manufacture of those products.
The consequences of lax management of the production of such devices have been evidenced in severe distributed-denial-of-service attacks that have taken down the services of vendors who refused demands for extortion payments, or who simply had rivals willing to resort to DDOS attacks by injecting attack code into hundreds of thousands of devices at manufacture.
When this is mandated in the future, manufacturers of IoT devices will be required to appoint a professionally licensed IoT Device Officer, who must personally sign, and accept liability for the actions of, IoT devices.
The manufacturers of all devices that include IP stack software should also be required to have their bitstreams signed by a similar licensed professional signing officer.
