The Internet of things (IOT) has brought up the need to manage many more identities than expected. The access management in IoT  for these diverse identities has become quite challenging. There is much more personal and critical data to handle, which has to be protected from all kinds of thefts and losses.

Security management has become crucial as more IoT devices are getting connected intermittently and are being required to communicate with other devices and backend infrastructure. As the move towards designing and deploying IoT has just begun, this might just be the most appropriate time to figure out what the IoT access management requires.

Security and authentication

Evaluation of each manufacturer’s IoT implementation is crucial as it will help you choose vendors that have adhered to applicable standards and communication protocols. To provide a proper security system, they need to have designed the IoT system according to the best available practices as defined by the leading security groups.

As smartphones and other mobile devices play a major role in IoT, they can potentially be used as a means of authentication to access things. Next generation mobile devices have leading-edge authentication mechanisms such as facial recognition, voice recognition, gesture dynamics and handling dynamics apart from the more traditional biometrics such as fingerprints. They can be used for enterprise level authentication for IoT access management.

You can also look into the “Killswitch” functionality. It allows administrators to disable device connectivity to all kinds of networks (internet, local area network, Bluetooth), in case any vulnerabilities are identified. A reset button can also be used if a killswitch does not seems plausible. This reset button could be configured to restore the highest level of security automatically.

Customer Education

The end IoT user needs to be given instructions regarding these things:

1. How to identify that a software needs an update
2. How to rollback updates in case of errors
3. How security of other IoT devices can affect the security of their device
4. How to understand requirements for safeguarding customer data and enabling privacy-related configurations

Customers may not be familiar with the security aspects of their devices and probably won’t even expect threats to their devices. In place of blacklisting undesired functions, they should be asked to whitelist the functions whose impact they fully understand. Moreover, it will be of great benefit for all parties involved if the users are explained the impact that IoT has on data CIA (confidentiality, integrity and availability). Awareness sessions should be held to promote best practices related to securing IoT.

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