The proliferation of connected sys-terns is offering huge advantages to individuals and businesses the world over. Formidable cost savings are possible in terms of time efficiencies and additional features. Consider, for example, a utility company that is now able to connect to electric meters over the Internet. Think how many person-hours will be saved when, instead of sending a reader to check on individual meters, a management center can connect to a large number of meters and collect billing information instantly. Usually, when designing an application such as meter checking, networking code is verified and tested for proper operation within a well-defined test environment. Testing often includes interoperability with numerous other products using well-behaved and friendly software that has been verified to comply with the networking protocol specifications. But many businesses find communicate with the system. There is no guarantee that such software will behave properly. In fact, the system could connect with hostile software written specifically to launch break-in, denial-of-service and buffer-overflow attacks.
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