Secure Things: Protecting Devices and Data

In IoT, every device is a potential doorway—and most breaches start at the edge. Secure Things: Protecting Devices and Data focuses on the unique security challenges of connected devices that operate unattended, constrained, and often forgotten after deployment.
This book treats IoT security as a lifecycle problem, not a feature. It explains how vulnerabilities are introduced during manufacturing, provisioning, updates, and decommissioning—and why traditional IT security models fail when applied to fleets of physical devices. The emphasis is on realistic threat models, not abstract checklists.
Readers are guided through how attackers exploit weak identity, insecure firmware, exposed interfaces, and poor key management. Just as importantly, the book shows how security decisions affect cost, reliability, and maintainability over years of operation.
Readers will examine:
• Why IoT devices are uniquely hard to secure
• How attackers target firmware, identity, and updates
• How to design secure provisioning and lifecycle controls
• Why device security is inseparable from data protection
• How to reduce risk without overengineering
This book is for engineers, security teams, and system owners responsible for connected devices in the real world. If your systems live outside the data center and stay online for years, this book confronts the security reality you cannot ignore.