IIoT endpoint vulnerabilities

Endpoint risk assessment and the implementation of security countermeasures require a thorough evaluation of the attack surfaces and attack vectors applicable to IIoT-specific use cases. Interested readers are encouraged to refer to the Industrial Internet Security Framework specification, which presents an elaborate analysis on "Security Threats and Vulnerabilities on Endpoints" (IIC-IISF). In this section, a few common threats and vulnerabilities associated with the various endpoint components are cited as examples:

Endpoint component	Threats and Vulnerability
Hardware	Unauthorized seizure of system resources, such as memory, processing cycles, and privileged access modes (privilege escalation exploit) Improper endpoint initialization by corrupting UEFI/BIOS and corrupting the boot process
Firmware	Steal code signing key or inject corrupted firmware through tampering Exploit vulnerabilities in code signing and firmware update process Rewrite firmware through...