A recent article in The New York Times examines a number of advancements in the world of high-performance sensors, all of which make the emergence of “smart dust”–a previously theorized worldwide network of super small, low-power, high-performance embedded sensors–one step closer to reality. Unfortunately, security is rarely one of the design considerations.

As reported in The New York Times,

Power consumption has long been the Achilles’ heel of sensor-based computing. Smart dust…proved impossible because the clever sensors needed batteries. Instead of dust…the sensor nodules would be the size of grapefruits.

But the power barrier…is rapidly eroding. Advances in sensor chips are delivering predictable, rapid progress in the amount of data processing that can be done per unit of energy. That…expands the potential data workloads that sensors can handle and the distance over which they can communicate — without batteries.

…Intel…is doing sensor research that builds on commercial RFID technology (for remote identification) and adds an accelerometer and a programmable chip — in a package measured in millimeters. Its power…can come from either a radio-frequency reader, as in RFID, or the ambient radio power from television, FM radio and WiFi networks. (For the latter, Intel is developing “power-harvesting circuits…”.

“The ability to eliminate batteries for these sensors brings the vision of smart dust closer to reality…”.

In this model of computing, the sensors are servants. They exist to generate data. And the more sensors there are, the better the data quality should be. When mined and analyzed, better data should in turn help people make smarter decisions about things as diverse as energy policy and product marketing.

If sensor-based computing takes off, it will ignite fresh demand for a wide range of hardware and software to store, process and search the new oceans of data for nuggets of useful knowledge. So it could be a boon to business, a foundation for what analysts call “the Internet of Things.”