In Mai 2018, Tobias and me were in Cologne at the Building IoT conference. The topics of the talks covered a broad spectrum of the Internet of Things field. There were three tracks covering different topics ranging from the jungle of IoT protocols, secure Linux hypervisors specially developed for IoT modules to machine learning and blockchain.
In “How to secure over the air updates” the speaker showed how to securely deploy updates over the standard communication channel to the target device. Many consumer IoT devices have a short support for updates if they get any updates at all. This leads and in the future will lead to bad news like botnets, bricked devices and exploited IP cameras streaming publicly. Therefore, a patch and vulnerability management is required – especially in industrial Internet of Things devices. Some updates have to be performed over the air due to the physical inaccessibility of some IoT devices in production environments. There are two possibilities to update such systems: First, a rescue OS (Operating System) boots and overwrites the existing production OS. The second option is a redundant OS, which copies the updates to the inactive OS and reboots to that.
Continue reading