NISARG DESAI, Director of Product Management, GlobalSign
There is no doubt the IoT has become an incredibly successful industry. Results of a 2018 Vanson Bourne – Software AG survey of 800 senior IT and business decision makers showed that one in four of the companies ranked IoT deployments as one of the most important initiatives within their organization. Not only that, 98 percent of the respondents were already generating some levels of return from their IoT investments.
Yet, a quarter of the respondents also stated that cybersecurity was still a challenge. This did not surprise me at all. In fact, I would almost say that number is surprisingly low. This is because every week our team meets with companies, from large enterprises to smaller industrial players, about their current or planned IoT initiatives. Also, we know the reality, which is that many IoT and IIoT devices have security holes. Which is why October’s announcement from Kaspersky about IoT attacks was also not much of a surprise to me, either. Using honeypots, the company detected 102 million attacks on IoT devices from 276,000 unique IP addresses in the first six months of 2019.
What we are finding is that quite a few deployments are delayed due to the lack of security. This is why I strongly believe in the future more and more cloud service providers will partner with security companies to offer secure device provisioning and management, as well as general secure IoT ecosystem for their customers. Attacks will continue and security standards, or the lack of adherence to them, will continue. The root cause is OEMs who are not willing to pay the costs involved to properly secure devices. Part of that solution is to pass the cost onto consumers, something they still fear and shy away from.
Building in security at the chip level
Despite OEM concerns around costs, it is essential to build secure IoT devices. This is the only way to significantly reduce attacks. We also know the bolt-on approach doesn’t work. The security – and really, the identity – must be considered at the earliest possible stages of a device’s lifecycle: the chip.
Device identities embedded on chips ensure the ultimate achievement in security-by-design and provides a means to secure an IoT device literally from chip to cloud. Device identity management companies and semiconductor manufacturers alike recognize the opportunity and are teaming up to make device identity at the chip level a reality.
A critical element to successful IoT security chips is public key infrastructure (PKI). All IoT devices with these chips require a strong identity, which will then be used for secure authentication. Devices need to prove who they are and not something else, generate their own identity and store it safely. Increasingly, devices are being built with a certificate to prove their trustworthiness, making the chances of unauthorized access be greatly reduced.
Solutions are increasingly coming to market to significantly boost security. For example, a Taiwan-based, global integrated circuit provider is taking advantage of PKI-based identity provisioning specifically developed for IoT device identity lifecycle management. It provisions a digital certificate for each integrated circuit. The integrated circuit manufacturer developed the hardware – a chip burner – to embed the digital certificate onto the chips. Together, the team is able to assign identities at the earliest stage of a product, directly onto the chip.
The digitally identified chip is then able to be used by the chip manufacturer in three ways. First, to secure the identity of their own smart home devices which they produce and sell. Second, it can generate and sell embedded certificate chips to other manufacturers looking to incorporate IoT specific chips rather than generic microchips into product design and production. Third, it affords the opportunity to sell the combination of the provisioning service and chip burner hardware to other manufacturers looking to expand their own ability to provision and embed digital identities onto chips at their own facility. The chip manufacturer anticipates that improving their production capabilities with the chip burner will give them a competitive advantage by offering security from the point of origin.
Expanding world of chip solutions to improve security
In addition to the chip company in Taiwan that has recently begun implementing a point of origin approach, others have been in the game for several years now. For example, Infineon and Renesas have been fascinating to watch. They have steadily been moving down the layers to companies selling secure MCUs capable of tasks such as key generation, secure key storage and boot verification. Other companies such as Intrinsic ID, which offers Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) – “digital fingerprints” – are another important approach.
Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) are also significant to ensuring IoT security. Traditionally TPMs have been the de facto gold standard for secure elements. These crypto co-processors are the hardware-based Root-of-Trust HROT for many critical systems. They possess several advanced capabilities like tamper resistance against both physical and digital attacks. Plus, they are standards-based, making them interoperable. One drawback is that TPMs can be expensive to procure, and leveraging these advanced capabilities requires some embedded crypto expertise. Finally, there is also work involved in adding a secondary chip to your motherboard.
Then you have microcontroller units (MCUs), small, self-contained computers that are contained on a single integrated circuit, or microchip. Secure MCUs are specialty MCUs that act as secure elements and have several cryptographic functions such as encryption of secrets, secure storage and other more advance security functions.
Another emerging area of secure elements that promises to change the game for device security by making it both easier, as well as cheaper, is by enabling device identity along with more complex security functions. The leader here is Micron Authenta, though this is not a security chip, but rather secure flash. You can think of it as a secure element, pre-embedded in flash memory. This has several advantages;
- Flash memory is ubiquitous on all devices, whereas a security chip like a TPM or Secure MCU needs to be added on specifically for this purpose.
- Ease of embedding is supreme, since you don’t install a new chip, you simply enable the secure functionality turning on this ‘feature’ in your Micron flash memory.
- The costs are cheaper than traditional secure elements.
- Authenta comes pre-embedded with multiple security keys that can be used for device identity, authentication and other more complex security use-cases needed by devices used in critical infrastructure such as secure boot and platform integrity attestation.
Finally, Micron provides additional Authenta services such as the ability to use these keys in a secure Firmware-Over-the-Air update (FOTA) and also has a cloud based KMS (key management service) to enable key management. This gives Authenta a superior value proposition.
While this is all a work in progress, and we might not see these chips in actual devices until sometime in 2020, we can take some comfort knowing products are coming online that will improve security outcomes for IoT devices.