Wind River Blog Network

Operating System Hardening Techniques and Security Strategies

By AJ Shipley

In my last blog post, I focused on securing the device at a high level, and in this post, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the technical aspects of device security; specifically, regarding defense against “run time,” or operational vulnerabilities, that a system is exposed to after it has booted up. 

A defense in depth approach requires that we assume that the integrity of the system will be compromised at some point, so we must implement security capabilities that are designed to mitigate such a breach if and when it happens.  One of the most devastating outcomes of a cyber security attack is for a malicious user to gain “root” access.  The threats that target the largest percentage of vulnerabilities are designed with this specific goal in mind, and in fact, the tagline of the popular Metasploit Framework is “Point, Click, Root.” 

If we operate under the assumption that a malicious actor will gain access to the system, we must ask ourselves what is the most effective way to quarantine those bad actors when it happens.  Various forms of access control, whether discretionary, non-discretionary, or mandatory access control ensure that if a system becomes compromised, the attacker does not have access to the resources or critical technology contained in the system.  Additionally, partitioning technologies such as a hypervisor or a separation kernel, ensure that a compromised operating system is not able to access other operating systems that may be running mission critical applications.

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Reliability….the key constant in network transformation

By Jessica Schieve 

Wind River recently conducted a webinar on the topic of network transformation and the growing trend around building greater intelligence.   The webinar discussed the results of a survey we commissioned through Light Reading exploring the different facets of network intelligence: packet acceleration, content inspection, flow analysis and traffic shaping, and network virtualization.  It was one of our highest attended events in recent months.  An archived version of the webinar can be heard here.

The webinar highlighted three significant results from the survey 1) advancements in multicore technology are making network transformation and network intelligence possible 2) the time is right for software to pave the way for higher network performance, greater security, and new services that take advantage of network intelligence, and 3) the majority of network equipment providers want a common software platform that can be used for multiple products. 

During the webinar we polled the audience on what they consider their greatest challenge in adopting a software-enabled network intelligent strategy.   Here are the results of the poll:

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Northrop Grumman X-47B UCAS-D Running on Wind River VxWorks Catapults from Aircraft Carrier

By Chip Downing

Today, the Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned aircraft achieved a successful catapult launch from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush carrier, the first of its kind in aviation history.  This marks a very proud day for Wind River knowing that our VxWorks real-time operating system is a key technology for this aircraft, developed as part of the Navy’s Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration (UCAS-D) program.

Northrop Grumman's X-47B is a tailless, strike fighter-sized unmanned aircraft currently under development for carrier operations. VxWorks serves as the foundation for the Common Core System, the backbone of UCAS-D computers, networks, and interfacing electronics on the X-47B. Built on VxWorks, Northrop Grumman engineers were able to rapidly create, deploy and maintain the safety-critical control system. 

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Securing Critical Infrastructure with MILS

By Paul Chen

On February 12, the White House released the Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience. The DHS website describes PPD-21 as “advancing a national policy to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure.” Sixteen different critical infrastructure sectors are identified, including: Chemical, Communications, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare and Public Health, Food and Agriculture, Nuclear Reactors, Transportation, and Water and Wastewater Systems.

On the same day PPD-21 was released, President Obama also signed Executive Order 13636 for “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.” The Executive Order directs NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to develop a framework for “reducing cyber risks to critical infrastructure,” for which they have issued an RFI and plan a workshop in late May.

And on March 26, the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, the German Federal Office for Information Security) published the Protection Profile for the Gateway of a Smart Metering System. Such devices will securely collect, process, and store information from smart meters, adding security to smart electricity distribution grids. The protection profile notes that the threat from a remote cyberattack is much higher than that from a local physical attack, since the attacker in network has the potential to compromise not just one, but many components of the infrastructure, or even the corresponding grid.

These developments highlight the focus on improving critical infrastructure security as attacks from cyber-terrorism have increased over the last decade and, alarmingly, in the past year on power, water, and nuclear systems. A recent report states that, indeed, most cyber-attacks now target critical infrastructure, moving “away from hacking and financially motivated crime” to attacks to “deny, disrupt, and destroy” service. For most of us, even the most destructive cyber-attacks like Stuxnet are fairly remote and don’t impact us; but if critical infrastructure services are denied, disrupted, or destroyed, cyber-attacks could become devastatingly personal.

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Let’s Talk About Securing the Device

By AJ Shipley

In my previous blog post, I touched on the key variables influencing how we approach device security.  In this blog post, I’ll focus the discussion on securing the device.  Before I do, I want to touch briefly on what was a key take away for me from last month’s RSA conference in San Francisco.  This year, the focus was more on big data, the collection of data from connected devices, and analysis of that data to identify malicious or unusual activity.  This is absolutely the correct approach to pro-actively and pre-emptively identify security threats, but it is important to remember that if the device that is providing the data is not secure, you cannot trust the data the device is providing, and most importantly, you cannot trust the device to carry out the actions that the data analysis indicates is required.

At a very high level, I approach security, and security decisions, from two different points of view.  You can either secure the network infrastructure, or you can secure the devices that attach to that infrastructure and communicate with each other.  While nobody would argue that great security requires securing both the infrastructure and the devices, there are different considerations that come with both approaches. 

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The CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors: What it means for embedded developers

By Bill Graham

The CWE/Sans Top 25 is fairly well known among security experts but might be overlooked by embedded developers since the list covers all types of systems and programming languages. Developers are fully aware of the quality impacts of many of these errors however they may be less knowledgeable of the security implications. The classic example is the buffer overflow error – all programmers know this is a bad thing and can cause a program to crash or become unresponsive. However, many developers fail to realize that an attacker can trigger these errors to execute code, reveal data or cause a denial of service attack.

The Top 25 list is a “who’s who” of dangerous errors that are the most commonly reported security vulnerabilities. This year’s RSA conference theme was ‘Security in Knowledge,’ and Wind River couldn’t agree more -- mitigating the risk of these errors is the first step to improving your device’s security. In this post I will point out what the 10 most important errors are from the top 25 list that embedded developers need to be aware of. In a subsequent post I’ll discuss the mitigation strategies and the role of automated tools in detecting and removing these errors.

The Big 10 Coding Errors and Impact for Embedded Developers

Some of the Top 25 are more applicable to embedded developers than others and arguably have a different priority. Also, some of the errors are from coding errors while others are configuration errors (or a combination of both.) In this case we’ve identified Wind River’s choice for the vulnerabilities that are most likely to impact embedded developers from this list. The “Big 10” errors that embedded developers are likely to encounter are as follows.

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Avionics Europe 2013 Conference

By Paul Parkinson

Last week I attended the Avionics Europe 2013 conference, which was held in Munich for the last time perhaps (as it is moving to Abu Dhabi in 2014).

The theme of this year's conference was 'Tackling the Challenges in Avionics: Single Sky Many Platforms,' which continued to focus on the growth in air traffic across Europe and challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation. However, rather than continuing to focus on the regulatory challenges as in 2012 (which I have discussed previously), there was a shift in emphasis towards the implementation of technologies such as SESAR.

One of the keynote speakers, Captain Sascha Unterbarnscheidt, A320 Captain and Director Operations Support, Lufthansa Germany made some very interesting observations in his address 'Single European Sky - Delivery to Daily Operations.' In particular, how the fragmented European air space (compared to the United States), led to ATM inefficiencies in 2011 resulting in 17.9m minutes of ATM delays, 8.1m tonnes of wasted CO2, and increased costs of around 5billion Euros (with the effect on passengers of delayed flights, longer flight times, wasted fuel and increased noise). He then went on to explain how the increased levels of automation and productivity through SESAR would result in increased capacity, reduced costs and lower accident rates.

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Top Five Variables Influencing the Approach to Device Security

By AJ Shipley

In my previous blog post, I covered the importance of having security built in and not bolted on.  In this blog post, I’ll outline the top five key variables that are influencing how we approach device security -- a topic particularly top of mind as I spend this week at the RSA Conference.

1. Connectivity to the enterprise and cloud.  Historically, embedded devices, while network connected, operated on proprietary protocols and dedicated networks.  A “great wall” so to speak, existed between the networks that powered our critical infrastructure, for example, and the networks that powered our enterprises.  However, due to the pervasive nature of Ethernet there is a desire now to leverage all of the security expertise that we have gained over the past 20 years deploying commercial grade enterprise networks and apply it to our embedded systems -- and then extend this when connecting to the cloud.  Herein lays the potential for huge productivity gains by leveraging the same infrastructure to collect data, analyze it, manage and update our devices, etc.  Along with the potential productivity gains comes the reality that we are now exposing our embedded devices to threats that they have never had to deal with before and probably aren’t suited to handle in the same manner that our enterprise infrastructure is.

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Security Must be Built In…Or Else

By AJ Shipley

Security cannot be bolted on, it must be built in.  This statement proves to be especially true when considering the recent hack of the New York Times, where during a four-month long cyberattack by Chinese hackers, the company's antivirus system from Symantec missed 44 of the 45 pieces of malware installed by attackers on the network.  Cases like this highlight the danger of relying on a single security product to keep you safe from hackers.  According to a written statement by Symantec, "Advanced attacks like the ones the New York Times described underscore how important it is for companies, countries and consumers to make sure they are using the full capability of security solutions. Antivirus software alone is not enough." 

As evidenced with incidents like this, products need to be developed that combine multiple layers of security to keep the “bad guys” out of customer systems, and to also minimize the danger and exposure to device resources and data if they do get in. 

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Healthcare and the 'Internet of Things'

By Santhosh Nair

The healthcare industry is embracing the 'Internet of Things.' From the advent of mHealth, to healthcare personnel bringing their own devices into the hospitals, to consolidations that are happening up and down the value chain, the healthcare industry is finally embracing its version of the Internet. It’s a topic that I discussed recently in a

Q&A session with Intel Embedded Community. With the ability to provide affordable care to the masses topping the lists of political and socioeconomic agendas globally, we need to make a lot more progress on this front.  Here are some on why we're still not where we need to be in terms of the global adoption and institutionalization of these concepts.

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The Advent of Multi-core MILS

By Paul Parkinson

It has been a rather long time since my previous blog post. I intended to post a blog before the holidays regarding our partner Curtiss-Wright's announcement about VxWorks MILS support on the VPX6-187, but I simply ran out of time! So here it is as my first blog post of 2013.

The Curtiss-Wright new release was actually quite a game changer. To the casual reader, it may just appear to be about the release of another board support package (BSP) on a leading-edge COTS processor card, but the fact that this BSP supports multi-core for a MILS architecture is what makes this announcement so significant.

When the MILS software architecture was proposed in 1984 by the computer scientist Dr. John Rushby, microprocessors at the time were inherently single-core, and computing performance advances were being driven by clock speed increases and die size, at a rate following Moore's Law.

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 3: Mapping the Tools to Activities

By Bill Graham

In the previous posts in this series, Part 1: Automation is the Key and Part 2: Security Improvement and the Software Development Lifecycle, I talked about the connection between the typical embedded device development process and the 5+1 improvement framework for embedded security.  Figure 1 is an illustration of this connection (and discussed in more detail in a previous post). 

 

Figure 1: Mapping the security improvement framework and the device software lifecycle

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Just minutes to a faster, smarter and more secure network

By Stephen Konish

A few minutes…and you’re on the fast path to building the next generation of faster, smarter and more secure network applications. Three minutes – that’s all it typically takes to install key components of the new Wind River Intelligent Network Platform. 

So, let’s take the next few minutes to look at  an evolution taking place for our networking and communications customers and Wind River’s software solutions for this market.  Tens of billions of connected devices continue to generate massive amounts of traffic and security threats are on the rise. In order to better manage the flood of traffic and handle these threats, greater network intelligence and security (without sacrificing high performance) is needed. On top of that, network products need to be scalable to handle future growth. Wind River is rising to meet these challenges and this evolution starts with the newly launched Wind River Intelligent Network Platform.  It is an integrated and optimized embedded software platform consisting of the critical runtime components needed to build high-performance intelligent network products.  So, what does that mean for the customer?

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Medical Device Security

By Jeff Fortin

A recent study published by GAO caused quite a bit of uproar over medical device security. The GAO declared in its report [read more] that the FDA has not put enough oversight in the premarket approval (PMA) of certain medical devices that are susceptible to threats. In the report the GEO referred to an experiment described in the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The experiment was conducted by a number of experts in security, medicine and engineering. They demonstrated the potential for a hacker to expose patient information as well as interfere with the correct operation of a medical device. The FDA has agreed to the GAOs insights – however pointed out that there have been no real world threats that have been reported to date.  According to the FDA, it did consider unintentional threats for information security, but did not consider information security risks from intentional threats until recently. In summary, the HHS – governing body for the FDA, concurred with the GAO recommendations and have initiated activity in this direction.  Medical device manufacturers must take the threat of security seriously.

Of all medical devices, devices that are implantable, portable or used in a home health scenario represent a growing concern for security and information privacy. I refer to these classes of devices as embedded medical devices. Developers and manufacturers of embedded medical devices are increasingly exposed to security risks as these devices become more complex and also connected to open networks. The good news is that in responding to this threat they need not operate in a vacuum nor do they need to re-invent the wheel. Best practices exist in other industries that can be leveraged by medical device manufactures. Of them the most straightforward is to design your products with security in mind. In other word, design for security. Here are a few things to think about when you design your medical devices.

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Test Management 5.0: Extending testing to Android, security and beyond

By Ido Sarig

Today we announced the latest  version of Wind River Test Management, which takes software test optimization to the next level. 

With this release, we have unified our testing solutions for VxWorks, Linux and Android under one umbrella. All the capabilities of Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST), our solution for Android compatibility testing, have now been merged into Wind River Test Management. This includes all the ready-to-run test assets, more than 26,000 tests in all, which are now available as Wind River Test Management for Android, with support for the latest version of Android  – Jelly Bean – already available!

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First Line of Defense

By Ka Kay Achacoso

Designing security into a device requires an understanding of the nature of the attacker.  The cost of security implementation, including  acquiring the technology carrying out the processes, scales up with attacker sophistication.  A rule of thumb is to make the device tampering cost higher than the benefits gained from a security breach.   

Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system platforms come with a set of simple security measures that protect the VxWorks applications against some clever hackers.  At the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in San Francisco next week, we will be demonstrating several layers of protection that come with the operating system (booth No. 400).

In this blog post I will outline a few simple security measures, already available in the VxWorks platform, that deter attacks on the VxWorks system. 

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 2: Security Improvement and the Software Development Lifecycle

By Bill Graham

In many of my previous posts, I’ve discussed Wind River's 5+1 step improvement framework for embedded device security. By design, it’s meant to complement the software development lifecycle (SDLC) that our customers are using – the stages or phases how they define them and the processes they follow. It’s important for a discussion on tools to put them in the context of the SDLC to see where they apply and how they are useful beyond just the coding stage.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the SDLC and our security improvement framework. The phase names and number of phases may change from customer to customer but the general idea remains the same. It’s important to note that the improvement framework is equally compatible with Microsoft’s Secure Design Lifecycle that is gaining traction amongst embedded developers too.

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 1: Automation is the Key

By Bill Graham

Security Vulnerabilities are Expensive

Shipping security vulnerabilities in a finished product and having them discovered or worse, exploited, is a very expensive proposition for embedded device vendors. As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, security defects are much more expensive to patch and fix the later they are discovered. If you’re lucky to catch a vulnerability during development, you can likely save your company and project thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, security vulnerabilities are expensive and costly not only in dollars but in reputation and customer satisfaction.

On average, a vendor loses around 0.6 percent value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. This is equivalent to a loss in market capitalization values of $0.86 billion per vulnerability announcement.  --Telang & Wattal 2007

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The New FACE of Avionics

By Chip Downing

Earlier this year, Wind River announced its support of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) technical standard, which hopes to resolve two fundamental problems with military procurements.

First, current aviation systems are typically developed for a unique set of requirements by a single vendor for a single aircraft, resulting in limited portability of software components, increased costs, and creating barriers to competition within and across airborne systems.

Second, the military aviation community has not created standardized architectural and software interface standards to sufficiently enable portability of software components across DoD aviation systems.  Commercial aerospace suppliers have standardized on open common core platforms based upon ARINC 653, which is a standard API for integrated modular avionics (IMA), but this has simply not occurred in military avionics systems.

The FACE technical standard will create an open, modular, multi-vendor software environment enabling portability and reuse of software components across multiple programs and platforms.  Combining this technical standard with a the FACE Business Guide will expand the selection options for military software components, reduce up-front procurement costs, reduce system integration cost and risk, and reduce upgrade and technical refresh costs.

To read the full blog post visit Military Embedded Systems

Simplifying the Security Approach

By AJ Shipley

As a security professional in the business of helping Wind River customers protect their systems from malicious intent I am frequently asked how they should approach security.   Here are my thoughts on a tried and true approach to security.

At a very high level, you can approach security from one of two possible paths; you can secure the infrastructure that devices use to communicate with each other or you can secure the devices that are attaching to the infrastructure.  Although great security requires addressing both the infrastructure and the devices, Wind River is specifically suited to securing the devices because of where Wind River products reside in the device stack.

A secure device is an orchestra of different security instruments including hardware security, application security, secure middleware, and secure communication stacks.  The conductor of this orchestra is the operating system which can effectively weave all of these instruments together to create a security symphony. 

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Identifying Backdoors in Production-Ready Code

By Ido Sarig

The security world is abuzz with news about a “backdoor” - undocumented  access to its programmatic interface -  found in a popular FPGA manufactured in China and used in US military applications.

Whether you are concerned that this is a deliberate Chinese plot to attack Western militaries, or relieved to hear that this is just a "common" backdoor, put in for debugging purposes, you should take note of the following:

"Backdoors are a common problem in software. About 20% of home routers have a backdoor in them, and 50% of industrial control computers have a backdoor. The cause of these backdoors isn't malicious, but a byproduct of software complexity. Systems need to be debugged before being shipped to customers. Therefore, the software contains debuggers. Often, programmers forget to disable the debugger backdoors before shipping.” 

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Securing Android for the Battle Space

By Tim Skutt

Armed conflict has radically changed.  Remotely operated unmanned vehicles and cyber warfare highlight this change.  Combatants can launch an attack anywhere from a few hundred meters away to half a world away with the same devastating results.  One of the fascinating – and scary – parts of this change is that the trigger firing the weapon has become the Enter key on a keyboard or a finger press on a touchscreen.

Essentially, the geography of the battlefield now includes the mobile devices we carry – whether we carry them into the physical front lines being fought with kinetic weapons, or the virtual front lines that extend to our corporate or even home offices. 

Global defense organizations recognize the value of commercial smart phone and tablet capability for deployment to soldiers in the battlefield, wherever that battlefield may be. The challenge of securing the commercial capability and mobile platform for warfighter use requires end-to-end system threat assessment and incorporating embedded device strategies to minimize cyber-attacks and maintain mission-critical communications.

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Security Regulations and the Public/Private Relationship

By AJ Shipley

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a cyber-security bill and sent it on to the Senate.  This got me thinking, what is government’s role in regulating the security requirements of our nation’s critical infrastructure? 

Security's primary goal is to establish a trusted relationship and protect people, products, and services from un-authorized or malicious intent.  When it comes to protecting our nations critical infrastructure that trust is fundamental to society operating in a mutually beneficial manner.  When that trust breaks down our society stops operating in a mutually productive way and we all suffer the consequences.  The air travel restrictions immediately following the September 11th attacks and the financial crisis of the 1920's and 2000's are prime examples of what happens when trust is replaced by fear.

Many believe that the market will self regulate itself in the absence of any incentives one way or the other.  But as a security professional, I believe that we must be proactive when it comes to protecting our nation’s critical infrastructure.  Security is a balancing act between business imperatives and security imperatives and finding the correct balance is very complex, and requires a deep expertise and a thorough understanding of the vulnerability landscape.  Unfortunately, for many companies, security is often viewed as an additional business expense.  When expenses are minimized, security suffers, and our infrastructure is put at risk.

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Improving Embedded Operating System Security Part 6: Harden the System Against Attack

By Bill Graham

In the previous posts I’ve discussed various steps that need to be taken in order to improve security, but these are all preventative measures that require validation before a device is ready for market. Enabling the security features of your embedded OS is the first step, but it’s important to test the system continuously throughout development. The importance of security-focused testing can’t be over-emphasized. Testing for security is a different activity than functional testing since the aim is to find and exploit vulnerabilities, often outside the realm of normal operation. Test automation is essential in order to do efficient and thorough security testing. Take a look at a post on this from my colleague Ido Sarig.

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Improving Embedded Operating System Security Part 5: Securing Code and Data

By Bill Graham

Secure the Boot and Execution

Embedded systems are vulnerable at boot time. For example, it’s common for hobbyists to re-flash consumer products’ firmware to change the way it operates. However, malicious attacks on device boot up and operation are undesirable for mission critical systems. In addition, devices often allow updates via web interfaces or other remote access creating a serious security threat if abused. Securing the boot image is an important step to securing your device. Trusted boot images are cryptographically signed with an identifier that the hardware recognizes as the only acceptable signature for execution.  An example of this is a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which provides hardware support for encryption, key storage and random number generation. Moreover, a TPM can provide a trusted key value for the device hardware and software. A device without its TPM wouldn’t start or if the software and hardware configuration didn’t match expected values. Any tampering with code or hardware prevents device operation. For example TPM support is common in many PC motherboards (although likely not used much in consumer use.)

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Improving Embedded Operating System Security Part 4: Partition Systems to Protect Essential Components

By Bill Graham

An effective security technique is to separate different major components of a system into partitions. In some cases these partitions are physical, i.e., separate devices with physical separation. With modern virtualization technologies these partitions can be virtual, in software, on the same device or processor. An example of this would be combining a general purpose OS (GPOS) such as Microsoft Windows or Linux and an RTOS such as VxWorks on the same device but each runs in its own virtual environment. In this way security attacks and vulnerabilities on the GPOS do not affect the mission critical control done in the RTOS. Similarly, the GUI and remote access for a device can be in one partition and the control systems in another.  Remote attacks that deny service or crash the GUI partition do not affect the control systems.

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What is the Real Impact of DO-178C and ED-12C?

By Joe Wlad

DO-178C and ED-12C are now released.  What does this mean for Wind River and its customers?

Now that RCTA DO-178 and its European equivalent, EUROCAE ED-12, have been updated after nearly twenty years, many are wondering, what is the impact to Wind River and our customers?  We’ve provided our customers with products and services based on DO-178B and ED-12B guidelines for over 10 years and have deployed certified VxWorks solutions on over 250 aircraft programs.  With the arrival of DO-178C and ED-12C it’s really business as usual for Wind River and we will incrementally adopt the standard in our future certification evidence offerings. Yes, the new release of DO-178 and ED-12 compel many to ask questions about how we comply, what our roadmap for approval is, and how we plan to support our customers now and in the future.

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Avionics Europe 2012 Report

By Paul Parkinson

I've just got back from the Avionics Europe 2012 conference and exhibition which was held in Munich.

The theme of this year's conference was 'Common Sky: Operating in One Air Space' focussing on the growth in air traffic across Europe, the challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation, and the development of SESAR air traffic management technologies.

I was keen to hear to how changes to the high-level policies would drive regulatory changes and drive technology requirements.

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Avionics 2012 Conference

By Paul Parkinson

It's been a long time since my previous blog, as unfortunately I've been engrossed in a number of projects!

However, I have just got time to mention that I'm really looking forward to the Avionics Europe conference in Munich on 21-22 March. The conference programme is pretty packed, covering cockpit avionics and technologies for civil and military aircraft; and aircraft, spacecraft and UAV sensor payloads, diagnostics and certification.

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Improving Embedded Operating System Security Part 3: Secure Your Network Communication

By Bill Graham

Many security issues with embedded systems stem from their connection via a network with access open to a large population (enterprise network) or even directly to the Internet.  Also, devices designed for small local private networks are increasingly connected to large corporate networks or the Internet directly.

It’s safer to assume that all external connections to your device are insecure – proliferation of your device to your customer base may go beyond your perceived use cases. In other words, expect the worst when it comes to network communication security – don’t assume the data you transmit is not sensitive or not of interest to outside parties. The best practice is to secure all communications in and out of your device (at a minimum make it optional).

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