Identity at Scale: how the Internet of Things will Revolutionize Online Identity

This article describes how insecure IoT devices—default credentials, lack of encryption, and unsigned firmware—enabled large botnets such as Mirai and Persirai to conduct massive DDoS and related attacks, stresses the systemic scale of the problem (tens to hundreds of millions of devices), and argues that automated PKI and certificate orchestration are necessary to provide scalable device identity and mitigate future cyber-physical risks.