| [edge-wg] Eclipse Edge Native WG call minutes — February 3, 2021 |
2021 IoT and Edge commercial adoption survey
The survey, which is distinct from our annual IoT developer survey, is underway. It will be open until February 28, 2021.
The last edition of the commercial adoption survey was conducted in 2019. The 2021 edition expands the scope to edge computing as well as IoT.
Members of the edge native community are invited to participate in the survey and help promote it.
Click here to start the survey.
Edge Device Security: Quarantine strategies
The following is just a brief recap of the conversation on this topic, which is a follow-up to the presentation by Bernhard Ortner on February 3.
It is difficult to determine if a device has been compromised or not. And there are various strategies that can be deployed when a compromised device has been detected. Do you simply mark the data as coming from a compromised device? Do you move the device to an isolated network? Operators will probably want to keep their management channels open to continue to control the device, but that is obviously a potential risk.
The following methods can be potentially used to detect a compromised device:
Monitor subsystems (storage I/O, file system)
Monitor network traffic patterns
New attached devices or removal of previously attached devices (USB is a well-known attack vector)
Monitor use of device physical ports (serial, for example)
Encryption at rest is one widespread way to secure the filesystem. Moreover, attackers trying to exploit the file system will create anomalous I/O activity that can be detected. Monitoring typical filesystem usage patterns can help detect compromised devices. Also, one could put honey pots in the filesystem: locations that the device will never read from during normal operations.
Devices also should test their integrity every time they boot and every time something changes. Some sort of configuration registry is also needed.
Device updates should be staged in a way where the previous version of the software is kept around and automatically rolled back to if, after rebooting with the new software, the device is not authorized to connect by the management infrastructure.
It is incredibly difficult to recover from exploits where digital certificates have been compromised. Just rotating them is painful.
Maybe the real question is about data integrity, not necessarily device integrity. In other words, one could choose to use the data (even from compromised devices) if server-side analysis does not find anomalies in it.
Safe boot / TPM is one way to harden devices that most serious manufacturers already leverage in the majority (if not all) of their devices.
Project updates
It was decided to skip that agenda item and keep it for the next meeting.
KubeCon Europe (online)
The conference will have a Kubernetes at Edge co-located event on May 4 and is open for CFPs now. More information here https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/program/colocated-events/#kubernetes-on-edge-day
some suggested topics
Kubernetes Distributions and Extensions for Edge
Using Kubernetes in retail, remote office, IoT and Telco applications
Using other open source projects to manage devices and applications at edge with Kubernetes.
Using Kubernetes for edge data collection and event processing.
Using Kubernetes to manage ML applications at edge.
Frédéric DESBIENS
Program Manager, IoT and Edge Computing | Eclipse Foundation
Twitter: @BlueberryCoder
Eclipse Foundation: The Platform for Open Innovation and Collaboration