NIST Opens Nominations for IoT Advisory Board

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is putting together an Internet of Things Advisory Board to help guide US policy discussions around IoT tech. The agency will be accepting nominations for board members until 5pm EST on February 28.

The first IoT Advisory Board will comprise 16 members. The NIST is hoping to assemble a team from a range of different backgrounds, with perspectives from academia and the non-profit sector in addition to the IoT industry. Each member will serve for a two-year term, and will be expected to submit regular reports to a separate Internet of Things Federal Working Group during their tenure.

While the Advisory Board will work with the Working Group, the NIST stressed that they will operate as two distinct but related entities. The Advisory Board will select IoT topics and provide the Working Group with any expertise they may have on those subjects. The Working Group will research those topics and help craft concrete policy recommendations. Most notably, the Working Group will try to discern what kind of impact (positive or negative) a policy may have on US businesses that work in IoT and IoT-adjacent spaces.

In that regard, NIST believes that IoT policy could have a major impact on businesses in the transportation, logistics, agriculture, and healthcare sectors. The Advisory Board and the Working Group are both being put together in response to Joe Biden’s 2021 Executive Order on cybersecurity, which asked the NIST to create two programs to figure out how secure data is when used and stored within a broader IoT environment. The programs will try to educate the public about good cybersecurity practices, and could inform the creation of security labeling criteria for equipment manufacturers that sell IoT devices to consumers.

President Biden’s Executive Order also came with new Multi-factor Authentication requirements, and was issued to improve the nation’s cybersecurity posture after a series of high-profile security incidents. IoT technology will become increasingly ubiquitous in a hybrid work environment, to the point that Goodix has predicted that there will be more than 1.2 billion NB-IoT devices in circulation by 2025.

Source: Nextgov

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January 17, 2022 – by Eric Weiss