3 Helpful Ways For Developers To Improve IoT Security On Their Devices

Following these three simple tips, you can enhance your IoT security without creating a needless hassle or paying too much as a developer.

The much-beloved Internet of Things has come to fundamentally reshape how firms in virtually every industry operate. Nonetheless, the 21st century phenomenon that’s connected us all has some significant downsides, chief among them its vulnerability to outside attacks.

As consumers and producers of IoT gadgets alike are finding their privacy and security increasingly jeopardized, many don’t know where to turn to for advice. By following these three simple tips, you can enhance your IoT security without creating a needless hassle or paying too much.

Ensure your gadgets are patchable

A staggeringly large amount of everyday IoT gadgets sold on the market come equipped with pre-prepared passwords which are essentially impossible to change, or, even worse, are just entirely impossible to patch. In the ever-changing digital world of the 21st century, IoT devices need to be patchable so they can be updated to resist the latest trends in malware attacks.

While leaders of the industry such as Apple or Microsoft take steps to send out regular updates and prevent their products from being vulnerable to the latest attack, many smaller companies fail to do the same. As more and more computers and sensors become embedded in virtually everything in society – from our infrastructure to our businesses – an unpatchable nightmare is developing. If this problem isn’t remedied soon on the supply-side of the IoT, it could unravel into an unfixable mess.

Focus on simplicity

The IoT industry is already well-acquainted with the idea of simplicity, as it’s long been a hallmark of digital gadgets. Nonetheless, many firms don’t take the steps necessary to ensure that the process of using and, critically, updating their gadgets and software is as easy as possible on the consumer-end of things.

Companies responsible for protecting your device should make the process of patching their products as easy as possible for their consumers, many of whom may not be particularly tech-literate. Users should be alerted about the latest security breaches, and receive a number of messages detailing what specific steps they need to maintain their security.

Small measures like this, which help strengthen the weakest-link in most security structures, everyday human users, can go incredibly far in strengthening your IoT security. Making it simple and easy for your users to regularly change their usernames or passwords, for instance, is a relatively stress-free change developers of IoT gadgets and applications could make to remove some vulnerabilities.

As attackers rely on hijacking huge numbers of relatively under-protected (and sometimes entirely unprotected) devices, the small steps that make even a few gadgets harder to break into can have a huge impact on their ability to successfully carry out attacks.

Don’t rely on a silver bullet

Many producers and consumers of IoT devices often have unrealistic security expectations, meaning the battle has been lost before it’s even really begun. While guaranteeing perfect security is a pipedream, those tasked with securing the IoT aren’t entirely helpless, and shouldn’t rely on a magical silver bullet to come and save them.

There is no true consensus for what the best IoT security practices are – many different experts and companies take their own unique approaches to the problem, and their responses are often very different from one another. Rather than waiting on innovation to deliver a god-sent solution to their problems, security experts would be well advised to keep pushing the envelope and trying to develop multi-faceted approaches to security.

As Wind River points out in their white paper on IoT security, itself entitled “searching for the silver bullet”, security experts would be better suited to take the developments of the last 25 years and attempt to modernize them to meet today’s problems. Constant reengineering will be necessary to meet the ever-shifting demands of tomorrow, but IoT users would be letting decades of progress go to waste if they turned their backs on yesterday’s achievements.

Building security infrastructure “from the bottom up,” as Wind River encourages, is the only effective way to guarantee the IoT well into the future. While we’re unsure of what threats we’ll face from malicious hackers and software tomorrow, we can rest assured that expanding user’s access to security features and educating the public on common security-pitfalls is a step in the right direction.

As Wind River’s paper highlights, security cannot be thought of as an after-measure. Rather, producers of IoT gadgets and apps must commit the necessary funds – no matter how expensive – to ensure security as early in the development process as possible.

The IoT is far too wonderful to be sacrificed to malevolent attackers who seek to exploit gaps in its security. Companies and users alike must rely on their own determination and commitment to a new, ever-expanding set of security norms if they hope to benefit from the IoT well into the future.

Source: Networkworld