The increasing growth of IoT devices is causing IT architects to rethink how they upgrade their infrastructures. Data and analysis have clearly pushed further out to the edge, with a multitude of sensors and monitoring devices collecting information for nearly every purpose. In fact, Gartner projects that by 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be generated and handled outside of traditional data centers or clouds.
The unavoidable temptation for malicious actors to attack edge device vulnerabilities and compromise data is an unpleasant byproduct of this growth. New edge computing security concerns, such as lateral attacks, account theft, entitlement theft, DDoS attacks, and more, can interrupt services in more ways than one. They provide a significant challenge to security professionals’ ability to deploy data at the edge in order to maintain a secure and dependable flow of critical information across the organization.
The security risks of edge computing
IoT and edge devices are frequently installed outside of a centralized data infrastructure or datacenter, making them far more challenging to monitor in terms of both digital and physical security. There are a number of edge computing security concerns that IT architects should be aware of:
Storage and security of data
Data gathered and processed at the edge does not have the same level of physical protection as data stored in more centralized locations. Vital information can be jeopardized easily by removing a disc drive from an edge resource or copying data from a simple memory stick. It can also be more challenging to provide reliable data backup due to restricted local resources.
Attacks and physical tampering
In an edge-computing architecture, physical tampering of devices is a likely possibility, based on their location and degree of physical protection from adversaries. By bringing processing resources nearer to data sources, edge computing, by its very nature, expands the attack surface.
Physical attackers seeking to breach entire edge networks have more parts to cover with an enlarged attack surface, but the fact that there are more devices in more locations makes physical attacks a lot easier to carry out.
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Outside standard information security visibility
Processing and storage at the periphery generally reside outside of traditional information security visibility and control, posing new security issues. Beyond standard data center security methods, living strategic plans must encompass heterogeneous mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) computing security.
Injections of malicious hardware or software
Cyber-attackers can use a variety of hardware and software-based techniques to corrupt, alter, steal, or erase data circulating within edge networks, especially when it comes to infecting and manipulating edge nodes, devices, or servers found at the edge.
Cyber-attackers can infiltrate illegal software and hardware components into the edge network, having a devastating impact on the efficacy of current edge servers and devices. It even allows service provider exploitation, in which entities that provide the software and hardware solutions that enable edge computing to begin unwittingly executing hacking processes on behalf of the attacker.