Ways to Strengthen Your IoT Cybersecurity

IoT security is the practice to keep your IoT systems safe and helps you get assurance of the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of your IoT solution. Moreover, today companies use IoT security tools to stay protected from threats and breaches. Also, these tools help discover and monitor risks, plus allow IoT cybersecurity testing Companies to fix vulnerabilities as efficiently as possible.   

Why Is It Important to Think About IoT Security Testing?

The industrial environment is becoming more interconnected with the rise of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). There are high risks of new cyber threats, and that can put influence over connected systems.  

More than half of the IIoT industrial provisions face cybersecurity incidents in the digital era, resulting in excessive power usage, downtime of factories, connectivity proofing, meter tampering, and many more.  

Besides, connectivity between cloud, IT, OT, and third-party systems are greatly increasing and becoming susceptible to attackers, and defending them has become more challenging and critical.  

Therefore, in order to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of IoT solutions and their data, getting a robust plan for IoT security testing or knowing the significance of IoT testing services is extremely important because they can help you get a higher level of protection while migrating data from one place to another. Plus, they ensure that you will gain valuable data and insights in a safer manner.   

IoT Vulnerabilities

 
Weak credentials are just one way to abuse IoT devices because several security flaws exist in these systems due to the continually changing nature of the technological business. Furthermore, vendors are under pressure to release devices quickly. Since if they take extra time while streamlining products, then they can experience huge risks in their market shares.  

By devoting spare time to the development, one could help prevent security concerns. Nevertheless, this step is usually skipped since security problems are not usually considered an issue until they have been exploited. As a result, devices that functionally perform as expected are inherently vulnerable.   

Some of the Common Vulnerabilities include in IoT are as follow:

Insecure/Weak Default Device Credentials   

 
For example, using username admin – admin & password – password.   

Lack of device encryption  

 
Even if you use a strong credential for your device, yet data and device communications are often left unprotected.   

Poorly designed hardware   

Hardware that has poor design focuses on “fashion over function” and can be easily modified or manipulated. 

Lack of infrequent patching / secure firmware 

Even after the availability of firmware updates, many users don’t know how to update devices.   

What are the Ways to Strengthening the IoT Security?

 
By implementing security best practices, you can easy to minimize the viability of IoT attacks and help your millions of customers get safer products. Undoubtedly, irrespective of the security implementation, some persistent actors try to compromise devices. Still, there are chances of improvements in our current standards.  

Accordingly, one should consider IoT testing and various best practices to strengthen IoT security and improve the quality of popular IoT devices.   

Let’s check out what are some ways that you can look forward to boosting IoT security.   

Ensure Strong Authentication

 
Use two-factor authentication where possible and increase the complexity of the default device based on the chances of risks.   

Conduct Testing for Bypassing Authentication Schema

In computing security, authentication is the way to verify the digital identity of the sender’s communication. A common instance of this process is the log-on process. Authentication testing of schema means understanding how the authentication process operates.   

Also, you need to use the knowledge to avoid the authentication mechanism. At the same time, most applications require authentication to perform tasks and access private data. However, not all authentication methods are able to provide the necessary security. Ignorance, negligence, or simple understatement of security glitches often come under authentication schemes, which can be bypassed by directly calling an internal page and skipping the log in page. Also, these factors are supposed to be accessed when authentication has been completed.   

On the other hand, problems associated with the authentication schema can occur at several stages of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), Involving the design, development, and deployment phases:  

• In the design stage, inaccurate descriptions of application sections should be protected. Protecting the transmission of credentials and considering robust encryption protocols are vital.
• In the development stage, incorrect implementation of input validation functionality is some of the errors that you need to improve; plus, being the security testing company, you should follow the best practices for the specific language.
• In the app deployment stage, issues can be found in the application setup, like in installation or configuration activities, due to less knowledge of technology, programming languages, or lack of good documentation.

How Should You Improve?

 
One should apply authentication across all services where it needs the most.   

Perform Black Box Testing

One can easy to bypass the authentication schema by using several methods designed for a web application:   

• Forced browsing (Direct Page Request)
• Parameter modification
• Session ID assumption
• SQL Injection

Execute automated, secure firmware patching

 
New issues are discovered almost every day. To avoid those issues or vulnerabilities, one should automate the patching process as it can help you secure your IoT devices.  

Consider Improved Device Encryption for Device Data and Communications

 
Always implement the strongest encryption according to your device. One of the major benefits of data encryption is it ensures that even if someone or an unauthorized party is trying to take over your data, it would still be difficult for them to read it.   

Manufacture Hardened Hardware

 
Always try to protect non-critical ports and minimize the overall attack surface to minimize threat capabilities.   

Platform Security & Visibility

 
Today organizations need secure technology platforms that are easy to integrate with security tools so you can concentrate on those tools to provide complete visibility to operations. One of the major reasons for thinking about platform integration is that it supports enterprises’ central management, ensures policy management, configuration management, monitoring, and remediation capabilities to identify and respond to attacks across an IT infrastructure of the enterprise, such as ensure to protect all endpoints, servers, networks, or cloud-based workloads. With platform support, you can get clear visibility, identify the root of harmful threats in the lifecycle, and effortlessly secure the data flow in a connected workforce, system, and application.   

Edge Gateway Security

 
IIoT devices deal with connected systems, large data sets, and sensor integration. Also, these systems or interlinked devices store and collect data with the working report. In case of making modifications in data by attackers, your industrial ecosystems can get damaged with production and billing. In this case, getting a security test is necessary. And, you should consider edge computing. Because it helps get proper visibility of devices, equipment, communication, processors, and processing time lags.   

Besides, you may know that IIoT devices create multiple access points that attackers can easy to leverage to harm your device. However, by applying edge computing, you can reduce the chances of errors and restrict the edge nodes and the cloud through a direct connection.   

In short, by following such practices and conducting IoT security testing, you can ensure that your IoT devices are free of errors and weaknesses that attackers consider to exploit your reputation. Thus, if you are using internet-connected IoT devices, IoT cybersecurity testing should be your top priority to mitigate threats that can grow faster from time to time. Apart from this, you should stay updated with the latest tools, methodologies, and integrated technologies to bring transformation in the IoT era.

This guest post was authored by Kanika Vatsyayan

Kanika Vatsyayan is Vice-President Delivery and Operations at BugRaptors. She loves to share her knowledge with others through blogging. Being a voracious blogger, she published countless informative blogs to educate audience about automation and manual testing.