Azure Sphere: A Secured Hardware Solution for your IoT Device Security

Posted by Kaushal Naik

IoT security is challenging but only few companies are taking action. Businesses are experiencing a significant rise in cyber-attacks and malwares, compromising devices and their security. In order to tackle this, Microsoft has taken considerable action and developed an end-to-end IoT solution, which is called Microsoft Azure Sphere that can safeguard the IoT devices from evolving threats.

There are billions of connected devices worldwide and the number is increasing. International Data Corporation (IDC) has predicted that by 2025 there will be around 41.6 billion connected devices. Many of these connected devices are powered by a small chip known as MCU (Micro Controller Unit). Like a human brain, MCU acts as a brain of the device that stores the data, hosting the compute, and an operating system on the device. In addition, to safeguard these microcontrollers from cyber-attacks you should integrate the device, software, and the cloud in one secure solution this is where we require an end-to-end IoT device security platform like Azure Sphere.

Securing your IoT ecosystem with Azure Sphere

Microsoft has expertise in hardware, software, and cloud technology to provide a secure connectivity from the silicon to the Azure Sphere OS all the way to the Cloud. It brings together Azure Certified MCUs, the in-depth defence of the Azure Sphere OS and over the air updates from the Azure Sphere Security Service that protect your devices from evolving threats.

With Azure Sphere you can securely develop the IoT solutions and connect to the cloud. Moreover, Azure Sphere lets you build your solutions on any cloud platform, be it private or public. It doesn’t require any specialized personnel to connect your devices securely as it uses the OTA (Over The Air) updates to keep your connected device up to date and secure. Microsoft has considered 7 different properties in order to safeguard the IoT devices. Let’s look at them in detail.

7 Properties of Azure Sphere to Safeguard the IoT devices

Lately, security threats against connected devices have been increasing, which has been causing companies to adopt security measures like Azure Sphere to safeguard their IoT Devices from attacks like a MIRAE botnet attack-taking complete command and control of servers, Xbash attack-attacking weak passwords and unpatched vulnerabilities., Muhstik attack– botnet self-installs and infects Linux servers.

Newer threats are evolving every day and hence it becomes essential to secure your IoT devices. Many companies are struggling to protect their IoT devices. With years of experience and research, Microsoft has found these properties for end-to-end securing of your IoT devices. These specifications clearly outline the needs of an IoT device with numerous protective layers to improve security.

Hardware Root of Trust

Single purpose hardware, so that it is more secure and hard for an attacker to hack the device. It can detect when it is likely to be attacked and how to mitigate the attacks.

Defence in Depth

The reasons for lack in security arises due to having only a single layer of defence, a single error in design sometimes can lead to security compromise. We cannot anticipate the threats hence having multiple security measures is required. Also, other reasons for lack in security is the load it creates on the processor and the costs.

Small Trusted Computing Base

Trusted computing base (TCB) comprises of both the software and hardware used to build a stable operating environment and it ensures the security of the system. It should be as small as possible, as less code = less bugs. This helps in reducing the attacks.

Dynamic Compartments

The compartments are protected by hardware boundaries to prevent any breach from software compartment. It provides additional protection within the software and hardware stack to create a layer of defence. For example, you can use operating systems processes or independent virtual machines as compartments.

Certificate-Based Authentication

You do not need a password protected device, passwords are problematic and prone to hacks or can be stolen. Certificates cannot be forged or stolen. In addition, it can be tracked if the device is compromised or not and necessary action can be taken.

Failure Reporting

An automated failure reporting would send the information when the device is hacked or attacks being attempted on it. In addition, it will also detect the flaws in software.

Renewable Security

As more security threats are discovered, software is constantly updated through new versions. An update provided to the cloud, which the software would apply to keep the system updated in order to keep the device from becoming vulnerable of being attacked.

These seven properties can be used by any organization to make sure they meet their security measures. Meeting all seven properties can be challenging, you can leverage Azure Sphere for that purpose. Azure Sphere sum up all these properties for securing your IoT device and keeps you ahead for your secured IoT developments. With this end-to-end security, companies will be able to move from smaller IoT developments to large-scale developments. Hence, for addressing these security threats, you will able to focus on more bigger IoT goals that benefit and improves the productivity of your business.