The Internet of Things may have a significant economic potential, but it also gives malicious actors an ever-expanding toolbox for cyber attacks. Gartner estimates that 5.5 million “things” get connected each day. It’s no wonder that hackers are beginning to target IoT devices with weak security for botnets and other attacks: they are often low-hanging fruit.
As both physical and digital threats increase, the need to find technologies to reduce such risks is also rising. This article will discuss the vulnerable points in an IoT application and the key strategies to resolve them, including details on maintaining supply chain integrity. It will also cover the fundamental elements needed to create a robust security paradigm.
For More Info Visit: https://www.einfochips.com/ips/iot-gateway-framework/
Communication and network security
An important aspect of any connected device or IoT system involves peer-to-peer communication between gateways and devices as well as communication to the cloud.
The following are critical from a security perspective.
• Channel-based communication using sub-channels such as data channel, control channel, management channel can enable secure communication. For example, security policy management and event monitoring messages need to be segregated at each level of communication.
• State-based management of a system is the most prominent way to secure the system. State analysis enables the ability of a system to react to unauthorized access requests.
• Categorization of unauthorized and authorized devices and applications that are engaged with the system.
• Geo-fencing of devices for unauthorized movement analysis.
• When a gateway receives a flood of messages, it can be overwhelmed in one form of a “distributed denial of services” or DDoS attack. Anti-jamming technology can be used to address certain forms of these attacks.
Data security
Securing data at endpoints involves data-at-rest (DAR) and data-in-use (DIU). The communication security is required for data-in-motion (DIM). For DAR, TPM (Trusted Platform Module) storage key can be used to secure the data. For DIU, runtime integrity techniques can be used to monitor memory access, and detect & protect against memory attacks. For DIM, data tokenization (a type of cryptography) can be used to protect sensitive data with encryption that can be decoded by authorized parties.
Cyber theft prevention
From a theft perspective, the most common type of targets are IP addresses, Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs), and malicious URLs. There are many frameworks that can identify the cyber threats and mitigate them, including the Collective Intelligence Framework (CIF), For building a chain of trust, it is important for IoT devices to share threats and other pertinent information with the nearby devices that are on the same network.
Hardware security
Hardware security can be achieved in an IoT solution with Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). TPM is essentially a chip that is installed on an IoT device near the CPU. It is used for mainly cryptographic operations, which creates a security key, saves it, stores the data and other related operations. They can use to ensure the integrity of a platform, for disk encryption and password protection.
Blockchain-based security
While blockchain is best known for its use in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the technology can be used for authentication in IoT networks as it uses a “micro-ledger” as evidence for peer-to-peer communications.