The Australian Institute of Marine Science is using an IoT drifter manufactured by Myriota to collect oceanographic data in almost real time. The drifters connect to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, so they are not using traditional mobile telephone networks, and avoid connectivity issues.

The drifters monitor ocean conditions, including water temperatures, currents and barometric pressure, all of which are important for weather tracking patterns and safety for the marine industry. The goal is to retrieve this information on an hourly basis.

When developing the IoT drifter, Myriota considered data security since all IoT devices, including marine drifters can be hacked and compromised. According to the CEO, “We had to really work very hard to solve a problem not just of data payload encryption—that’s fairly straightforward—the real challenge is the authentication and privacy aspects of the link so that you can’t, for example, have an attacker getting home metadata attacks on your IoT system.”

IoT devices are in an ecosystem and when they are connected to other devices and networks, a compromise could jeopardize the entire ecosystem. Embedding data security into IoT devices at the manufacturing stage is necessary for the success of the product and the IoT ecosystem.