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Depending on the way the corporate network is setup, you might need one of these at each location: does a grocery chain have a corporate-wide VPN already? I assume not because then you could avoid this whole situation by never exposing the hardware to the Internet. Even then, locking down odd hardware in a subnet would be a good choice.
It's often said that the "S" in IoT stands for security, and it's not really wrong, but the way we define "security" does manage to be difficult to implement on embedded devices. "Oh just use TLS" isn't trivial: most configurations there will need certs that get updated regularly. Do you even trust your CA to remain on the approved lists indefinitely? Will your choice of RSA-4096 still be acceptable for the life of the unit (say, 50 years)? What's your plan for post-quantum cryptography on a device built in 2003?
Your fridge also suddenly needs a good clock source to check the certificate time limits: now you need to set that on the device, potentially every time it loses power. NTP works, but isn't foolproof or even secure in most deployments. These things aren't trivial, unfortunately.
In practice, a large, long-lived SSH key signed by corporate would work fine, but none of the normal tech stack is really setup for this today unless your users like command lines. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's not in the normal wheelhouse for technicians who specialize in wrenches.
I've never worked for one, but I assume they do for the POS system, along with other ERP system access for inventory, receiving, accounting, and so on. They should probably have multiple subnets per site for the sake of isolation, but that's a bit of a hassle to combine with a VPN and may not have been done.
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