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You're reading from Practical Internet of Things Security - Second Edition

Product typeBook

Published inNov 2018

Publisher

ISBN-139781788625821

Edition2nd Edition

Tools

AWS Azure

Concepts

Internet of Things Security

Authors (2):

Brian Russell

Drew Van Duren

View More author details

Chapter 10. Cloud Security for the IoT

Cloud services bind distributed edge devices together, and provide analytics, intelligence, data storage, and event-processing capabilities for IoT systems. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offer menus of IoT-tailored services that make it easier to connect, manage, monitor, and control large numbers of devices.

With these services, system designers can implement new cloud-based capabilities such as asset and inventory management, service provisioning, billing and entitlements management, sensor coordination, customer intelligence and marketing, information sharing, and messaging.

These services expose interfaces for IoT products, and these interfaces and the services that support IoT at the edge must remain secure.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

The role of the cloud in IoT systems
Threats to IoT cloud services
The concept of the fog
Cloud-based security services for IoT systems

The role of the cloud in IoT systems

Without the cloud, IoT edge devices would have limited usefulness. The cloud enables system owners to collect and transform data into intelligence. Cloud services provide the brains for robotic systems; they provide machine learning tools to aid in decision-making for complex systems, and they store the data collected at the edge.

The cloud even provides cybersecurity services for edge devices, from provisioning of identities and certificates to monitoring for anomalies in operations.

The following diagram is a genericized virtual private cloud that offers basic functional and security services to protect device-to-device data transactions. It shows typical, virtualized services available for general IT as well as for IoT-enabled deployments:

Not all IoT deployers will need to make use of all the cloud capabilities available, but most will require a minimal cross-section of services, and require them to be well-protected.

A notional cloud security approach...

The concept of the fog

Another edge computing facet of an IoT system architecture is known as the fog. The OpenFog Consortium released in 2017 a reference architecture (https://www.openfogconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/OpenFog_Reference_Architecture_2_09_17-FINAL.pdf), in which they defined fog computing as:

A horizontal, system-level architecture that distributes computing, storage, control, and network functions closer to the users along a cloud-to-thing continuum.

Fog nodes are, as you would expect, placed nearer to edge devices in an IoT architecture. This allows for data analytics nearer the edge, and decision-making with minimized latency (minimized reach-back to the cloud).

Of course, the cloud still plays a role in these architectures, although cloud services are used for longer term, less cyclical data storage and more robust processing capabilities than are feasible at the edge or in the fog.

Fog computing allows data captured by IoT devices to be processed nearer to the edge. This...

Threats to cloud IoT services

A cloud- and fog-enabled IoT system has many points of interconnection, and many services running in support of system operations and management. Each of these represent potential entry points into the system for malicious actors.

With the addition of new edge-based services from CSPs, attackers can also focus on the execution logic on the device itself to cause malfunctions or deny operations. The addition of a fog layer adds more complexity to the system and another set of attack targets:

The following table examines some of the threats that may be associated with a cloud-enabled IoT system. For each, ensure that you have system requirements in place that properly mitigate them:

Cloud-based security services for the IoT

CSPs that offer IoT services may also provide security services tailored specifically to IoT implementations. These may include:

Device onboarding
Key and certificate management
Policy management
Persistent configuration management
Gateway security
Device management
Security monitoring
Compliance monitoring

Device onboarding

Before IoT devices can support your organization's use cases, they must be onboarded into your system. The process of onboarding transitions devices from an untrusted to a trusted state within your organization. After the onboarding process is complete, the devices are registered, provisioned with required identity and cryptographic materials, and configured.

Although onboarding seems like a simple concept, there are two primary challenges that must be overcome:

The scale of the IoT makes it difficult to onboard all of your devices manually
Transitioning from untrusted to trusted states provides bad actors an opportunity to infiltrate your...

Summary

The cloud, the fog, and the IoT will continue to converge as time progresses and technologies mature, leaving system architects with a wide range of choices as to where to place intelligence, data storage, management, and security features within an IoT system.

In this chapter, we discussed the cloud and the fog, threats to a cloud-enabled IoT system, and CSP IoT security offerings.

In Chapter 11, IoT Incident Response and Forensic Analysis, we'll explore incident management and forensics for the IoT.

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Authors (2)

Brian Russell

Brian Russell is the founder of TrustThink, LLC, where he leads multiple efforts towards the development of trusted IoT solutions. He has over 20 years of information security experience and has led complex system security engineering programs in the areas of cryptographic modernization, cryptographic key management, unmanned aerial systems, and connected vehicle security. He is the co-chair of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) IoT Working Group and was the recipient of the 2015 and 2016 CSA Ron Knode Service Award. Brian is an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego (USD) in the Cyber Security Operations and Leadership program.
Read more about Brian Russell

Drew Van Duren

Drew Van Duren has provided 20 years of support to commercial and government customers in their efforts to secure safety-of-life and national security systems. He has provided extensive applied cryptographic design, key management expertise, and system security architecture design through rigorous integration of system security design with the core engineering disciplines. Drew has managed as Technical Director the two largest FIPS 140-2 test laboratories, security-consulted for the New York City Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment, and participated in multiple standards groups such as the RTCA, SAE, and IEEE 1609 working group. Today, he supports the IEEE P1920 committee heading security architecture for unmanned aircraft aerial networks.
Read more about Drew Van Duren

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Threat area
Targets/attacks
IoT products at the edge	Disabling IoT device sensors Tampering with sensor inputs Modifying sensor data on-device Hijacking the command/control link to the device Overwriting/manipulating event-based processing rules on the device Uploading new firmware to the device...