Your comprehensive guide to cybersecurity in physical security
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How you design the cyber architecture of your physical security system will vary depending on your industry, your requirements, and the types of deployments you have.
For instance, you could have a simple on-premises security installation, a full cloud or hybrid cloud deployment, or a combination of different sites and deployments all connected back to a central monitoring location.
No matter what your installation looks like, investing in physical security solutions that are built with cybersecurity in mind allows you to configure a strong cyber architecture.
That’s because you’ll have access to various built-in cybersecurity technologies such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and authorization, alongside other hardening tools, privacy measures, and health monitoring features as mentioned earlier.
Your cyber architecture is essentially the foundation of your cyber posture. It’s a place where all your end-to-end cybersecurity measures come together to establish resilience.
So how do you build cyber secure architecture? It starts with choosing solutions that are developed with security and data protection in mind.
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Physical security systems inherently collect a lot of personal information. Think about your video cameras that monitor public spaces or the cardholder information you’re keeping within your access control system.
As new privacy laws come into effect all over the world, there’s even greater pressure on organizations to keep all that information secured.
This evolving privacy legislation is supporting citizens’ grievances about the growing use of physical security technology, mandating that organizations take ownership for how they collect, manage, and share personal information.
What’s important to understand is that privacy protection and cybersecurity go hand-in-hand. Limiting the collection and processing of physical security data using tools such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and authorizations help you ensure higher levels of protection against threat actors. But a truly robust data protection and privacy strategy goes further.
From the onset, you’ll want to think about the technology providers you partner with and how they handle cybersecurity and privacy organization-wide. Vendors who take onus for their role in helping to protect data and privacy offer technology that is built with Privacy by Design. This framework ensures that cybersecurity and privacy protection features are more accessible to you, and when possible, enabled by default.
With these purpose-built privacy features at hand, you can bolster your protection methods by blurring identities in video footage, automating retention policies, and securely sharing information during investigations or when a citizen requests it. You can also use audit logs and generate reports to see who accessed what files, systems, or devices at any time and further strengthen compliance. Informing your customers or employees about how data is collected and used by your organization is the critical final step. Openly sharing the steps you’re taking to protect and secure information help to appease concerns and establish higher levels of trust.
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Having multiple layers of defense built into your physical security solutions is critical. And encryption is one of the most important and first-level layers to properly secure your data from cybersecurity breaches.
In simple terms, encryption helps you protect all the physical security data that is sent from your security devices, such as video cameras, access control readers, and other IoT sensors, to and from your servers and client workstations.
When you encrypt your security data and communications, you’re basically encoding information or scrambling readable text to hide and protect it from unauthorized users. This is all done through an encryption key that uses an algorithm to turn readable text into encoded information, also known as ciphertext.
Only the intended recipient who has access to the decryption key will be able to see the unscrambled, original information. That means even if a cybercriminal penetrates your network and gains access to your data, the encryption will prevent them from being able to read it.
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When securing your physical security solutions, you need to make sure that the person or entity accessing your systems and information is who they say they are.
After all, too often, employees can fall victim to phishing scams and credentials can get leaked. This is where multi-factor authentication and built-in password protection can help.
But first, what does authentication mean? Authentication is a process that validates the identity of a user, server, or client application before granting them access to your protected resource. It’s a critical security system feature that helps to stop hackers from doing things like pretending to be a security server to access your sensitive data.
On the client side, authentication can include various techniques such as usernames and passwords, and security tokens. On the server side, the confirmation of trusted third parties is usually provided through digital certificates.
What’s most important to understand is that a single authentication is never enough. Moving forward, everyone should consider implementing multi-factor authentication.
This means on top of usernames and passwords, you need other forms of authentication such as phone authenticator apps, biometrics, or hardware security tokens like a Yubikey or a smart card. This adds additional safeguards to your authentication mechanisms to further defend against threat actors.
