How can I secure and automate my IoT Edge?

Question

I want to create a docker image that is installed on the edge device runs on it. I also want to automate this deployment to the edge device and secure it. I've read about the security daemon but I'm not understanding the documentation, is it a concept? Do I have to worry about security or is it taken care of by the daemon?

Answer 1

Hello @Pedro Lemos,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

By default the Azure IoT Edge offers quite some security out-of-the-box.

Just to name a few:

• Each IoT (Edge) has its own identity
• The IoT Hub offers only connectivity based on TLS
• The IoT Hub can filter only on certain IP ranges
• The IoT Hub can communicate with devices within a private network
• The internal module-to-module communication is secured with a certificate
• The Edge only needs/uses an outbound connection to communicate to the cloud

The Azure IoT Edge solution does not covert the Operating system.

You can use Azure Arc to manage the device operating system. Eg. deploy updates on the operation system and check metrics.

If you want to add extra security, Azure IoT Defender offers two solutions:

• Agent less, the network traffic is monitored with a service
• Agent based (this is the one you reference), an Agent is put on the OS as a daemon and provides security metrics to the cloud via the IoT Hub connection alongside the Azure IoT Edge (using the same identity management).

So, no, this is not a concept and you need to add some effort to make the edge device as secure as you need.

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