The ultimate weapon? It's the Internet of Things (IoT) that will dominate our wireless future.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to weaponize these innocuous connected things such as baby sensors, health trackers and your oven with the noble motive of making the U.S. less vulnerable to future attacks from these things directed by state-sponsored terrorists.

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Goodbye, attack of the killer tomatoes! Hello, attack of the killer things!

IoT is the network of physical things embedded with electronics, software, sensors and network connectivity that permits these things to collect and exchange data wirelessly. It allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely.

DARPA last March asked the American public to help it weaponize the IoT. The DARPA project responsible for this is named "Improv" and it aims to discover new ways in which everyday technology can be compromised and become a security threat.

DARPA asked white hat hackers, researchers, industry vendors and anyone else that knows how to hack IoT devices to hack embedded devices and consumer technology to uncover possible avenues of attack.

Improv's targets include technologies used in agriculture, transportation, and other "easily purchased, relatively benign technologies" that could be repurposed for nasty purposes.

"Improv is being launched in recognition that strategic surprise can also come from more familiar technologies, adapted and applied in novel ways." said program manager John Main.

"DARPA's mission is to create strategic surprise, and the agency primarily does so by pursuing radically innovative and even seemingly impossible technologies."

Mann reveled DARPA often looks at the world from the point of view of potential U.S. adversaries to predict what they might do with available technology. DARPA brings together a small group of technical experts to do this.

DARPA first accepted and studied submissions to Improv from the public. It's now supporting selected projects with the goal of developing a working prototype of the device within 90 days. DARPA is also funding these projects.

The breadth of IoT is massive and unobtrusive. The connected devices comprising the IoT universe are expected to grow to 21 billion by 2020. Imagine if just a billion of these were weaponized.

DARPA said Improv grew out of a changing landscape for security. It noted the shift in research and development away from government to the public sector ended the monopoly the government had over advanced technologies. This seismic shift also created a much larger pool of experts and researchers able to spot potential wicked uses for technology.

TagsDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, Internet of Things, IoT