Column: Security Trust and Insecurity Bob Frankston IEEE Consumer Technology Society PREFACE & WHEN IWAS first advocating home networking at Microsoft, we encountered a problem. The existing systems and applications had implicitly assumed that they were inside a safe environment and did not consider threats from bad actors. Early Windows systems had not yet provided the file system with access control and other protections though there were some attempts to have separate logins to keep some settings separate. The temporary solution was to take advantage of the limitations of using a Network Address Translator to share a single IP address. That made internal systems invisible by default. This problem became most visible when I first got a broadband connection at home in 1995-I could look at the files on neighbors' home computers because of the way NETBIOS worked at the time and there were no filters. I expected that when IPv6 became available, it would use encryption by default and that applications written for IPv6 would be written to protect themselves from bad actors. Alas, that did not happen. One reason is that the firewall approach became institutionalized as a feature. Part of this was a simplistic view of security we see in Windows and its idea of Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2022.3231779 Date ofcurrent version 9 February 2023. private versus public networks that assume a static and unambiguous distinction between good actors and bad actors. It does not help that the systems try to guess whether you are on a public/private network using heuristics. And when it guesses wrong, you start to see perverse and hard-to-diagnose failures. Rather than making things simple, such approaches make things more complicated and bring back the limitations and complexities of the physical topology. This is why, we have SSIDs for Wi-Fi. They emulate the physical boundary of the wired network, and the limitations of the physical topology. The idea of a security perimeter is very tempting because it emulates the security perimeters-the walls around our homes and the walls that once surrounded villages. The village walls are no longer the norm because the idea does not work well in the real world. PERIMETERS When I first learned about ThreadÒ,a I was excited because it is a distributed (or meshed) protocol that builds on the readily available 802.15.4 radios used for Zigbee radios. Soon, a Thread Benefits (threadgroup.org). [Online]. Available: https://www. threadgroup.org/What-is-Thread/Thread-Benefits 4 2162-2248 ß 2023 IEEE Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazinehttps://www.threadgroup.org/What-is-Thread/Thread-Benefits http://www.threadgroup.org https://www.threadgroup.org/What-is-Thread/Thread-Benefits