News

Security Tool Now Available for AWS Cloud IoT Devices

• By David Ramel
• 08/07/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of AWS IoT Device Defender to help organizations follow best practices in securing their Internet of Things devices.

AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that continuously audits IoT configurations, which are organization-specified technical controls to help keep information secure when devices are communicating among one another and the cloud.

The new tool seeks to make it easier for organizations to manage these configurations to ensure device identity, authenticate and authorize devices and encrypt device data.

Along with continuously auditing the IoT configurations on devices against a set of predefined security best practices, AWS IoT Device Defender can also monitor devices to detect unexpected behavior and anomalies that could indicate a compromised device and send out an alert so organizations to fix any potential issues, the company said in a post last week.

Spokesperson Jeff Barr detailed how the new service works in his own post, where he discusses audits -- scanning for imperfect configurations and AWS issues such as overly permissive IoT policies -- and detection functionality.

"On the detection side, Device Defender looks at network connections, outbound packet and byte counts, destination IP addresses, inbound and outbound message rates, authentication failures, and more," Barr said. "You can set up security profiles, define acceptable behavior, and configure whitelists and blacklists of IP addresses and ports. An agent on each device is responsible for collecting device metrics and sending them to Device Defender. Devices can send metrics at 5 minute to 48 hour intervals."

AWS regions in which the service is available include: Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

More information on the service is available in the Device Defender developer guide.