Safeguarding the Internet of Things

The rapid growth of the internet of things (IoT) has made enterprise networks and IoT devices extremely vulnerable to security breaches. Apart from government institutions like NSA and businesses like Equifax, the threat looms large for any kind of company that deploys IoT applications and infrastructures from small businesses like Wyoming LLC to even bigger ones. Hackers infect and control devices so that they can access them for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults.

However, most organizations’ security budgets do not take into account the need for securing their IoT subnetworks. That is because several current IoT devices are not equipped enough to ward off security attack methods which are getting increasingly sophisticated with every passing day. The heterogeneous nature of the software used in devices, inadequate monitoring systems, and lack of visibility into IoT devices make the process of safeguarding IoT ecosystems all the more complex.

The Best Technologies to Safeguard IoT

• IoT Authentication: One of the several ways to protect your gadgets from these hacking breaches is to implement protocols of the Internet of Things authentication and self-testing. Authentication is used on a regular basis with passwords for various sites and services. This kind of identity verification is critical for IoT as the interaction takes place not just between machine and user, but also between machines themselves. Hence, machine to machine authentication protocols has become absolutely necessary to protect these interactions against unauthorized access. There are billions of IoT devices around the globe, connected through large networks through which bulk data is being exchanged every day. If the authentication protocol is not implemented on your machine, it could be accessed by a hacker’s computer pretending to be a sensor on the network. IoT authentication protocols allow the users the ability to authenticate an IoT device, manage multiple users of a single device ranging from simple static password pins to more robust authentication mechanisms such as two-factor authentication. Digital certificates and biometrics can also be authenticated. Unlike most enterprise networks where the authentication processes require a human being entering a credential, IoT authentication scenarios (such as embedded scenarios) require only machine-to-machine interaction without any human intervention.
• IoT Encryption: Encryption data at rest and in transit between IoT edge devices and back-end systems use standard cryptographic algorithms, thus helping to maintain data integrity and preventing unauthorised data access by hackers.
• IoT Network Security: this system entails protecting and securing the network connecting the IoT devices to back-end systems on the internet. This technology includes traditional endpoint security features such as antivirus, anti-malware as well as other features like firewalls, intrusion prevention and detection systems.
• IoT Security Analytics: This system involves collecting, aggregating, monitoring and normalizing data from IoT devices so that specific activities can be reported. These solutions are starting to adopt sophisticated machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data techniques to provide predictive modelling and anomaly detection.
• IoT API Security: This security system uses documented REST-based API-S to provide users with the ability to authenticate and authorize data movement IoT devices, back-end systems, and applications.

With ever growing interconnectivity, hackers find newer ways to breach personal devices. However, the more security you add, the possibility of getting hacked gets reduces.