Webinar:
How to respond to cybersecurity incidents and consequently re-secure your IoT devices after their market release?
The widespread use of connected devices poses several cybersecurity challenges. Most of us are familiar with the high-profile attacks conducted with malware and ransomware, but beyond the data security issue, these attacks can also pose personal safety as well as intellectual property challenges. The need for protection is therefore no longer in question, so what should you do? QShield was designed to address IoT security challenges, here’s what you need to know.
Because you need to protect your devices’ integrity as well as your data and your intellectual property, QShield offers several levels of protection.
Several IoT businesses are now data driven. One of the main risks in the IoT industry is producing incorrect data since it could bring to take bad decisions. The attacks of data theft and against data integrity could have a huge impact on the business and, in some cases, can only be detected when the data has been compromised.
Many business owners are not aware of the risk of Innovation theft. Yet, this is another main risk faced by technology companies. The attacks are very discreet and once the damage is done, it is hard to fix.
Of course, there are legal remedies, unfortunately those are usually insufficient: by the time you realize that you have been hacked, your business has been already impacted, you took bad decisions, the counterfeit product is already on the market, your competitive advantage is lost, and your image as an innovative company may be jeopardized.
Fortunately, there are technical solutions to prevent innovation theft:
To perfectly meet the challenge of protecting technological innovations with technology, QShield integrates advanced obfuscation and protection layers in your innovations’ source code to protect it from theft and advanced white box based encryption libraries that guarantee data protection.
By giving an ID to each connected device in your IoT fleet, you can:
Authentication provides an additional layer of security, because if a device is compromised, it can be identified, disconnected, and updated without affecting the rest of the fleet. The problem doesn’t spread, and operations can continue. In addition, if hackers or cybercriminals try to launch a volumetric or DDoS (denial of service) attack, they will have to hack each IoT separately, which is time-consuming and deterrent enough.
Your cybersecurity solution also needs to identify each connected device in your fleet to protect its source code, authentication tokens and data. This is what QShield does with the most advanced cybersecurity technologies.
While volumetric DDoS attacks are typically intended to cause congestion, they sometimes serve as a diversion for more targeted attacks such as disabling security systems. While there is no foolproof way to counter this type of attack, as seen above, there are solutions to strengthen the overall protection of your IoT fleet: IoT device authentication, encryption keys, obfuscation.
The more layers of security you add, the more secure your connected devices will be. QShield is designed to keep hacker’s hands off your IoT devices and software with more than 30 obfuscation passes, remote application self-protection (RASP) mechanisms, cryptographic keys and white-box cryptography.
If you have connected devices running on untrusted environments, they are at the mercy of hackers who will use all sorts of techniques to access your sensitive data or your source code to reverse engineer it. Here are the 3 main cybersecurity technologies that can help protect your IoT environment.
Obfuscation technologies can be used to protect your source code and sensitive assets. The technique is to deliberately add complexity to your binary to make it difficult or impossible for humans to understand it. Some innovative obfuscation rounds can minimize the impact on performance and size of the obfuscated software by guaranteeing a good level of protection.
QShield offers best-in-class software protection with scalable protection mechanisms delivering excellent performance/security ratio. Application developers can thus fine-tune their security profile to the specific logic of each software and cybersecurity managers can design the most appropriate security configuration.
Cryptographic keys are generated to produce cryptographic signatures, which authenticate connected devices. Unprotected keys are usually hidden in the source code or in configuration files and are quite easy to find by hackers. It only takes a quick visual inspection by anyone who can read a binary to find them, and once the hidden key has been found, the integrity of the device and the data it communicates are compromised.
The best way to protect devices running on unprotected environments is white-box cryptography. It is a combination of encryption and obfuscation used to embed your cryptographic keys directly in the source code in a way that makes the two indistinguishable.
Authentication tokens, unique identifiers and passwords are sensitive data that you don’t want hackers to access. Encryption helps protect your secrets against these risks and can be achieved using APIs. These APIs leverage hardware or Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) security features to enable data encryption. However, these features are platform and software dependent.
QShield provides extra data protection with an abstraction layer that provides data encryption for various platforms without having to reimplement security measures for each. Data Protection is a library exposing a key value API to encrypt sensitive data using available hardware cryptographic capabilities or, if these are not available, leveraging advanced white-box cryptography, ensuring that your data is always protected and bound to a specific device.
QShield protects your source code, cryptographic keys and sensitive data from static and dynamic attacks and allows for both local and remote response without investing in expensive programs and devices.
All components are constantly reviewed by Quarkslab research labs to enhance the level of security.
All QShield components have been successfully certified by EMVCo, a global technical organization that manages specifications and testing to facilitate interoperability and acceptance of secure payment transactions worldwide. For the first time, their certification has included a white-box cryptographic component.
This certification ensures a high level of security, as it requires the use of robust technologies, mainly for applications related to mobile payment, but also for use in IoT fleets, especially in unsecured environments and for the protection of software intellectual property.
Want to learn more about QShield? Request a demo!
Webinar:
How to respond to cybersecurity incidents and consequently re-secure your IoT devices after their market release?
