Cloudflare Proposes A Much Needed Security Solution For IoT

The world famous Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Internet Security service provider, Cloudflare has now decided to extend its services toward the IoT industry. For this, the company has designed a new security product called Orbit exclusively for the IoT enabled devices. Cloudflare was only operational in Cyber Security domain so far where it’s used for securing a website against all kinds of online threats such as XSS attack, CSRF attack, Null byte attack, DDoS attack and SQL Injection. And now with Orbit, the company has finally ventured into the IoT industry.

In response to the increasing security concerns regarding the IoT industry, this can be perceived as a masterstroke played by the company that will help millions of users in protecting their devices from being misused. Matthew Price, the CEO of Cloudflare Inc. unveils that the project took 18 months into development and it was backed by a team of more than 50 developers. He further adds, ‘seeing the awful security of the IoT devices in present state, it makes sense how leading security companies are seeing it as a potential market. Let’s see what’s Orbit and how it works.

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The Need of IoT Security

The life has got easier as more and more devices are connecting to the internet. But on the other hand, it has also imposed an everlasting risk of not only losing your data but losing access to your device as well. If attacked by the hackers, your IoT device can be manipulated and it can even be used against you for all that matter. As a matter of fact, the Internet of Things has already come under the eyes of the black hats. Over the years, there has been a massive incline in the number of DDoS attacks against the IoT devices.

Last year in October, we saw a massive DDoS attack encountered by the Cloudflare network. It was a 1.75M rps DDoS attack that involved 52,467 unique IP addresses. Most of these IP addresses belonged to the hacked CCTV cameras. The attacks continued for almost 15 minutes and the Hong Kong and Prague datacenters of the company were badly affected. However, timely actions were taken to avert the danger, this incident questioned the company’s so called cyber security claims. In the investigation that followed, it was revealed that most of these attacks were carried out by the hacked IoT devices, mostly web cameras.

Orbit: IoT Protection by Cloudflare

Orbit, the solution proposed by Cloudflare for IoT security, operates at network level and establishes a secure link between the IoT device and its origin server. What Orbit does is, ‘it separates the device from the internet as long as the device is running behind Orbit.’ In that case, the device will be considered under I*oT rather than IoT.

In this way, Orbit enables the manufacturers to deploy ‘virtual patches’ for upgrading the device software without any potential risks involved. While the deployment is in progress, Orbit blocks the vulnerabilities across all the devices on the same network. This not only protects the device from receiving all sorts of malicious requests but also gives more time to the developers to carefully carry out the upgradation. This kind of security will be specially helpful in protecting the device against all kinds of DDoS attacks.