Secure Onboarding and Management of Electronic Shelf Labels in Retail

Electronic shelf labels (ESLs) are seeing increased adoption in consumer retail, due to their many operational advantages and potential to enhance the shopping experience. However, ESLs can be vulnerable to cyberattacks that could severely disrupt many basic activities related to administering shops such as daily pricing updates, inventory tracking, promotions, and possible legal compliance with respect to in-store/online prices policies. More importantly, security vulnerabilities can be exploited to potentially inflict financial harm on shoppers who take advantage of pay-and-go services enabled by ESLs. In this work, ESL vulnerabilities are discussed along with the necessary capabilities that should be included into these devices as countermeasures.