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.
