IoT Device Monitoring and Remediation

This presents a challenge as all the components in an IoT infrastructure must be continually monitored. When problems do arise, actions must be taken to remediate identified issues.

Monitoring and remediation are critical to ensuring an IoT ecosystem provides services, data, and most importantly value to customers and end users in a secure and trusted manner.

Monitoring and Remediation Challenges

There are a wide range of real-time conditions that must be monitored, including the state of health of IoT devices, communications between devices and applications in the ecosystem, and potential security breaches that compromise systems and data.

One of the biggest challenges associated with identifying and resolving problems is that IoT environments are typically not homogeneous, consisting of devices with different versions of software and hardware.

IoT Monitoring and Remediation Framework

In order to proactively manage these complex environments, intelligent systems are required to provide timely alerts when problems are identified, and to make sure resolution occurs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

To meet this challenge, technologies and mechanisms to manage traditional, large scale IT systems and networks have been adapted for monitoring and remediation of IoT ecosystems.

A common monitoring framework used for this purpose is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), which is the merging of two categories of technology developed for IT deployments – Security Information Management (SIM) and Security Event Management (SEM).

SIEM systems collect and monitor real time data from different sources:

• From device specific agents about a device’s characteristics (e.g., version number) and pre-specified events such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks or hardware failures.
• From third party security industry information sources that maintain up to date information about known security vulnerabilities, breaches and updates.

SIEM technologies monitor the data collected from these sources and generate alerts and reports so certain conditions can be flagged when they occur. These systems do not resolve identified problems – it is up to system administrators to take appropriate action based on the insight provided by the SIEM platform.

A new category of technology has emerged to automate the responses to identified problems. End Point Detection and Response (EDR) systems provide both the monitoring capabilities of SIEM along with intelligent, automated remediation to issues that have been identified.

As an example, if a security breach is detected, a system can automatically be shut down, or a software version can automatically be updated if there is a known vulnerability.

EDR is a robust platform that offers timely and secure problem identification and resolution within large scale IoT implementations.

Allegro Software’s Role in IoT Monitoring and Remediation

Allegro Software builds device specific, lightweight agents for IoT devices to exchange state of health and security data with End Point Detection and Response Systems.

Allegro employs its configurable security toolkits, using XML and JSON formats, to enable secure communication between IoT devices and EDR technologies.