IoT has been a buzzword for many years. IoT has provided value-adding insights. Be it in improving your lifestyle at home, offices, or smartly manufacturing and consuming products. Earlier, due to limited commercialisation and sluggish development, IoT was not within reach of everyone. With recent innovations and progression, 50 million devices have been connected with IoT by 2020.
The success of IoT depends on the confidentiality of data while mitigating security risks. What should we know more about IoT security?
Major IoT Challenges
Security is the biggest challenge in IoT. IoT improves communications among devices. We leverage the benefit of the transmitted data. Security is a vital concern where data is transmitted to the Internet. Some of the challenges of IoT are:
a. Data Security
With continuous transmitting of data to the Internet, it is important to secure against theft and tempering. Different types of threats present to the data are:
- Data Leakage: Hackers with malicious intents have an eye for such devices where data is readily available to them. Such leakage of data can grant access to personal information and monitoring of the data.
- Dos Attacks: Attackers may send bulk messages to the IoT-enabled devices. As a result, the device will be unable to perform proper functionalities. It is necessary to detect and block unauthorized access to prevent Dos attack.
- Falsification: The attacker may collect the data packets and replace them with false information. It may change the functioning of the IoT devices entirely.
b. Data Privacy
Data is abundantly available these days that is a trade-off against data privacy. It is used to draw, analyze and implement the insights. Such data is sensitive and highly confidential. Improper security measures will lead to the breaching of data privacy.
c. Lack of trust in users
The benefits of IoT are unquestionable. But security attacks, lack of common security standards keep businesses away from IoT. Besides these, users cautious of the consequences of security breaches. A recent survey shows that 90% of consumers do not trust IoT device security.
Preventive measures for security concerns
The first step for any IoT business will be to go through security risk assessment to determine vulnerabilities in devices, network systems, user, and customer backend systems. IoT security can be classified into system security, application security, and network security.
- System Security: It mainly focuses on overall IoT systems to identify security challenges, design security frameworks, and provide necessary guidelines.
- Network Security: It deals with securing the IoT communication network that communicated with different IoT devices. Several data encryption and SSL (secure socket layer) techniques can be implemented to establish network security. Blocking of bad requests and unauthorized access must be implemented to secure the network.
- Application Security: It represents the handling of security issues in applications according to scenario requirements. It will effectively reduce data leakage charges. Applications must have their authentication algorithms. They will increase security and will act as a roadblock for attackers in case network security is compromised.
Conclusion
As IoT is scaling and expanding geographically, it is more prone to security attacks. These risks must be evaluated and mitigated as the data is sensitive.
