What Is An IoT Gateway And How Do You Keep It Secure?

What-Is-An-Io-T-Gateway-And-How-Do-You-Keep-It-Secure

IoT gateways should be considered at all times. It has been observed that there is a need to secure the communication protocol between devices.

Iot platform can be a dedicated hardware appliance or software program. It is key to a growing number of applications such as smart homes, smart cities, and smart grids. IoT gateways are critical. Sensors and devices are connected to an IoT gateway, which sends everything needed for translation and processing to a cloud data center. It implies that information that moves from an IoT device to the cloud is passed through a connected IoT gateway. All data that flows between the IoT device and cloud must pass through the data gateway, so it is important from the security perspective.

The IoT system uses a Wi-Fi connection, and the gateway then routes its data to the cloud. The IoT Gateway is managed by a third-party provider such as Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, or Microsoft Azure. It depends on the type of data, protocol, and connectivity. As such, it may need to support a variety of protocols to serve all IoT devices in your organization. A data center can serve two purposes: it can be the origin and control of all your IoT devices or be responsible for the data that comes from scattered IoT devices.

Your security strategy should ensure that all your devices use a certificate and valid for all devices in your organization. IoT gateways can protect your data and the data of your customers, employees, and other connected devices. There is a need to ensure that your IoT gateway is secure enough to have the ability to protect all your connected devices.

If you lose the IoT gateway at the center of the communication chain, it could jeopardize the entire IoT ecosystem. IoT devices connected to your gateway and all devices using it are at risk in the event of a breach. Kaspersky mentioned IoT gateways and pointed out that many are only meant to secure the gateway itself. If this gateway is breached, all connected devices and any IoT device connected to it are also at risk. Why you use an IoT gateway has everything to do with the level of security of communication. Still, it can also be monitored in other ways, such as whether it is designed to secure a gateway or not or whether you have breached it.

Before developers commit to a particular solution, they need to know the threat models associated with IoT gateways and IoT devices and the methods used to prevent and mitigate these threats. Considering the intended use cases in which a gateway would be deployed, different risk modeling methods can be used to identify the security controls implemented in the gateway to protect your IoT device.

Let’s try to understand the different types of IoT gateways and their role in the security of your IoT devices. The IoT gateway, a hardware or virtual appliance, receives data from an IoT sensor that can send it to the cloud. This data exchange is driven by the fact that the IoT gateway collects data over the network and meters and sends it to the IoT cloud for further processing. The IoT gateway hardware consists of several components: the device itself, the data memory, and the gateway itself.

Various architectures turn the device into a multi-tenant application hypervisor to leverage its capabilities. Newer IoT gateways also work on this platform as application code that processes the data and goes on to become an intelligent part of a device-enabled system.

It is clear that IoT gateways are also software-enabled and can initially be virtual, but they must be able to connect with an IoT operating system. The security of the IoT device can also be ensured by choosing an intrusion prevention system that actively protects the network and provides Saas. IoT gateways are more complex than Wi-Fi routers because they may have had to cache data to flood the gateway with more data than it can handle. Taking all these use cases into account, the IoT gateway must always be designed to protect it from threats – vulnerable IoT architectures.

IoT Gateway is a firewall-protected network gateway that directs traffic between internal and external computers and networks. IoT gateways offer software-driven capabilities to edge networks, known as edge computing, connected to the cloud as an IoT device. These may be physical devices or software programs that connect to a cloud via a network connection or a physical connection to an external network.