4 min read  | Penetration testing

How to make security penetration testing a part of your IoT security strategies

Given that the technology we use is becoming smarter every day, it’s not surprising that the demand for smart devices is increasing. While IoT devices certainly make life and business easier, it’s also imperative to ensure that they are secure in the face of vulnerabilities.

IoT devices are vulnerable to the same array of attacks as you would find in other areas of technology, which means that they need to be tested and held to the same security standards as your other tools and devices.

Given that there will be 20 billion IoT devices installed across the world, the data being transmitted via these devices and stored in them is at increased risk. While this surge in IoT tech can save us plenty of money and time, they can prove extremely dangerous in the absence of a well-thought-out security strategy.

One way to safeguard these devices is through security penetration testing. In this post, we explore how you can incorporate this strategy into your IoT security processes and practices. 

Don’t neglect physical security

Most businesses don’t consider physical security when they’re trying to safeguard their IoT devices with security penetration testing. This, however, must be your first line of defence against potential threats and vulnerabilities. 

The difference between physical security and the software security we’re more familiar with is the fact that these attacks require physical proximity to your devices. These are further categorised as invasive (involving physically tampering with your devices) and non-invasive attacks.

To prevent these, it’s important to look into elements like configurable parity, lockstep, and isolate roots of trust, and make sure your strategy encompasses both hardware and software security measures. 

Incorporate threat modelling into your processes

Information and data security on IoT devices usually take a back seat compared to other types of business technology. By incorporating threat modelling processes as part of your security penetration testing processes, you can secure the information security on these devices more effectively. 

By taking this step, you may be able to detect and mitigate certain basic threats like Denial of Service, denial hijack, action spoofing, faking the data source, and alteration of installed BIOS.

Enhance the effectiveness of your security solutions with penetration testing

To gain critical insights into the nature of certain IoT devices, decompiling and assessing firmware dynamically or manually can help. When you accompany this process with security penetration testing, you’re able to gather actionable insights that help you locate bugs in its code.

Even among hardware devices, there could be widespread bugs like a CLI injection that can be detected when you accompany these hardware assessing processes with security penetration testing.

Conduct secure code reviews

Using manual or automated processes to review an application’s source code can help you identify security vulnerabilities and threats. While it may not identify every issue in the code, this type of security penetration testing provides insight into what types of problems exist and helps developers understand what classes of issues are present.

Secure code reviews, therefore, facilitate greater security across your IoT devices from the outset, instead of as an afterthought.

Enhance IoT device safeguards with powerful security penetration testing

Ensure that the IoT devices your teams use are put through multiple layers of security so you can detect and address vulnerabilities and exploits that threaten your security posture.

Part of this process relies on security penetration testing, which can help you identify vulnerabilities that may be lurking beyond your sight. By identifying the right opportunities and points of intervention, you can incorporate these methods into your IoT cybersecurity strategies successfully. 

Get in touch with our team at Triskele Labs to discover how we can help you manage and reduce risks through holistic and end-to-end security penetration testing.