A new report from Venafi (a privately held cybersecurity company) focuses on these vulnerabilities and proposes actions that businesses should be taken to help to safeguard their systems. The report calls for more secure and reliable machine authentication in order to protect machine-to-machine communication. Other recommendations include the need to create, install, rapidly assess and ensure the integrity of communications between machines.
The report is titled “The Machine Identity Crisis: How the explosion of machines is affecting the security of machine-to-machine communications” and it is hosted by Data Breach Today.
The report looks at out growing dependence upon machines and mobile devices. With machines, data is used to illustrate the steep climb in the number and type of machines which “is driving an increase in the average number of devices per household as well as per internet user around the world.” Moreover, with mobile technology mobile data traffic is expected to increase sevenfold between 2016 and 2021 with 16 billion devices in use by 2020. To this Gartner predicts that 25 billion IoT devices will be in use by 2020.
These developments produce vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.
IoT vulnerabilities
With IoT devices, because they typically have limited CPU and storage capabilities, the data captured needs to be transmitted to a central location for collection and analysis. Given that most of this data is commercially sensitive, it is important that communications are authenticated and protected. This presents considerable challenges in securing communications between IoT devices, the Internet and enterprise networks.
Mobile communication vulnerabilities
Businesses face new pressures to uniquely identify and authenticate each mobile device in order to authorize secure communications between mobile devices, enterprise networks and
the Internet. The problem is that few businesses possess the tools necessary to achieve this, which reduces the ability of businesses to protect sensitive data flowing through mobile devices.
Cloud vulnerabilities
There are many business benefits that can be derived from cloud computing; however, to protect the security and privacy of cloud data, businesses need to adopt new measures to encrypt the data and adequately secure the machine identities.
The report concludes that the best route for organizations to address these vulnerabilities is through intelligent automation. This includes having complete visibility into every machine identity that touches a business network and being able monitor the identities in real time so that misuse can be detected.
