Infrastructure protection
Design time is the ideal phase for considering security requirements for infrastructure protection across the entire lifecycle of your device and solution. By considering your devices as an extension of your infrastructure, you can take into account how the entire device lifecycle impacts your design for infrastructure protection. From a cost standpoint, changes made in the design phase are less expensive than changes made later. From an effectiveness standpoint, data loss mitigations implemented at design time are likely to be more comprehensive than mitigations retrofitted. Therefore, planning the device and solution security lifecycle at design time reduces business risk and provides an opportunity to perform upfront infrastructure security analysis before launch.
One way to approach the device security lifecycle is through supply chain analysis. The IoT supply chain includes the actors, processes and assets that participate in the realization (for example, development, design, maintenance, patch management) of any IoT device. For example, even a modestly sized IoT device manufacturer or solution integrator has a large number of suppliers that make up its supply chain, whether directly or indirectly. To maximize solution lifetime and reliability, ensure that you are receiving authentic components.
Software is also part of the supply chain. The production firmware image for a device includes drivers and libraries from many sources including silicon partners, open-source aggregation sites such as GitHub and SourceForge, previous first-party products, and new code developed by internal engineering.
To understand the downstream maintenance and support for first-party firmware and software, you must analyze each software provider in the supply chain to determine if it offers support and how it delivers patches. This analysis is especially important for connected devices: software bugs are inevitable, and represent a risk to your customers because a vulnerable device can be exploited remotely. Your IoT device manufacturer or solution engineering team must learn about and patch bugs in a timely manner to reduce these risks.
Although there is no cloud infrastructure to manage when using AWS IoT services, there are integration points where AWS IoT Core interacts on your behalf with other AWS services. For example, the AWS IoT rules engine consists of rules that are analyzed that can trigger downstream actions to other AWS services based on the MQTT topic stream. Since AWS IoT communicates to your other AWS resources, you must ensure that the right service role permissions are configured for your application. The same applies for connected devices with AWS IoT Greengrass for cloud services the device needs to talk to.
AWS offers flexible ways and design patterns to establish a secure connection to the AWS environment from the edge. When choosing a secure connection to the AWS environment, take into consideration the use case requirements such as latency and data locality to ensure that the chosen connection solution meets the performance and compliance requirements. Use AWS Systems Manager to carry out routine management tasks on edge computing resources, Secure Tunneling for AWS IoT Device Management to access IoT devices behind restricted firewalls at remote sites for troubleshooting, configuration updates, and other operational tasks and AWS IoT Greengrass for secure remote application management. Take advantage of on-premises managed infrastructure solutions such as AWS Outposts, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Snow Family to simplify management and monitoring.
