Why IP Filtering Is Important for Security

When you put together an IoT solution the intention is always to route data traffic to where you want, but this isn’t always ensured. Devices and IoT SIM cards aren’t inherently secured and we have written numerous articles on ways to lock your IoT solution down. Today we want to discuss the best way to ensure that data can only go where you expect using IP Filtering on your IoT SIM card.

IP Filtering (or IP Whitelisting) is a method whereby you identify only those IP addresses where data can travel. This is critical because IoT SIM cards and devices tend to be open to send data anywhere and without filtering at the IoT SIM card level, devices can be hacked to send data to other IP addresses other than where you want the traffic to go. 

OneSimCard has the ability to filter the IP addresses where our IoT SIM cards are able to send data. This is accomplished by whitelisting the IP addresses where you want data traffic to end up. Our clients send us these trusted IP addresses and we set these rules up in our Network server to only allow he IoT SIM cards to send traffic to these addresses. If the IoT device attempts to send traffic to any other address, it will fail because we have blocked that IP address by rule.

Use cases for IP Filtering are numerous. Here are just a few examples:

  • IoT SIMs in Hotspots for employees to limit the IP addresses where the employee can navigate using the company asset (not exactly IoT, but the SIM doesn’t know that!);
  • SIMs in ATM’s and credit card processing where banking information is transmitted and must be secure and data traffic must be limited;
  • Alarms and security products like cameras because, especially with cameras, only you want to have this data, and leakage to other IP addresses can be expensive;
  • Any IoT solution which counts on very small data quantities because data leakage can lead to overage and higher costs.

If you would like to learn more about our IP Filtering solution for IoT SIM cards and if this is something that makes sense for your organization, please reach out to sales@onesimcard.com and one of our IOT experts will be glad to talk this through with you.