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IoT Edge Secure Remote Access

Build Status

Docker Containers (IoT Edge Module) Repo- https://hub.docker.com/r/suneetnangia/azure-iot-edge-secure-access

This solution allows a secure remote access to your IoT Edge by leveraging device stream feature of IoT Hub.

The custom IoT Edge module in this solution run multiple IoT devices virtually on the edge which takes advantage of the security features of device stream. Both clients and Edge/Device makes outbound connection to the streaming endpoint of IoTHub, no inbound connection is made to either client or Edge/Device.

Each virtual device is an IoT device in IoT Hub which makes an outbound connection securely to Iot Hub. Data is transferred on websockets using TCP as-is without any modification. Proxy service in the diagram below runs local to the clients and it's primary function is to authenticate against IoT Hub and broker TCP connections to websocket. A sample of this service is available here.

Solution is described in below-

solution design

Key Features-

  1. JIT (Just in Time) Access.
  2. Auditing.
  3. Secure Access via Device Stream.

Surface Attack Area- There are two attack areas for edge devices in general-

  1. External to the local infrastructure.
  2. Internal to the local infrastruture.

External- solution design It is important to realise that the surface attack area for edge device is moved to IoT Hub in this instance. IoT Hub provides built-in battle hardened features to ensure best practices like principle of least previledge are followed and surface a single control plane for your IoT solution, lowering the overall management overhead. The diagram above depicts the layers from which a user has to go through before they can access the edge device.

Internal- solution design Attack can equally arise from internal network/infrastucture as well, the above layers protect the edge device by implementing layer 4/7 level isolation and by not exposing any endpoint (using Device Stream feature).

Why hosting virtual devices in a module? Hosting a device virtually in a module has some benefits which can be useful in edge scenarios.

  1. You can host multiple virtual devices/protocols in a single module with lower resource (memory/cpu) footprint compared to hosting multiple modules one for each protocol (e.g. SSH, SCP, RDP).
  2. You do not have to expose unbounded ports on the edge, each virtual device can be restricted to a specific port, mitigating the risk.
  3. Each virtual device can be individually disconnected on-demand basis from IoT Hub to allow Just in Time (JIT) access.
  4. Single management plane (IoT Hub) for access management.
  5. Secure reverse connect mechanism underpinned by device stream feature.

Do not use this for application level connectivity which requires low latency and high throughputs, this is designed for on-demand/occasional access to the edge devices for debug or config reasons. One such example is when you want to remove the unused docker images from the edge.

To learn more about device stream feature, see here- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-device-streams-overview