Wireless stack improves IoT security

Instead of relying on piecemeal security at different intermediate links to a cloud application, UbiquiOS and Trusted Object’s partner Avnet Silica will offer a secure TLS solution that supports:

• Personalised certificates with mutual authentication, distribution and renewal of session keys.
• Very simple and automated provisioning of a sensor/device into a remote application.
• Secure hosting of secret keys.
• X.509 standard for management of digital certificates and public-key encryption.
• Handling of cryptographic primitives.

These solutions can be implemented on MCUs as small as an ARM Cortex-M series, yielding message integrity and encryption without sacrificing functionality.

The number of connected IoT devices, sensors and actuators is projected to exceed 46 billion by 2021. IoT cloud applications will be utilised for asset tracking, shipping, sensor applications, predictive maintenance and remote monitoring. Security is essential in IoT cloud applications, which are built on vast networks and handle sensitive and proprietary data. Using the UbiquiOS integrated stack, cloud application developers now have a straightforward path to design secure solutions.

“Various end-to-end security solutions exist in the market, but none have addressed low resource devices,” stated Rusty Stapp, VP Sales and Marketing, UbiquiOS. “With UbiquiOS’ low cost wireless stack, developers can leverage a secure, fully integrated stack for IoT devices, freeing them to focus on creating differentiating application features.”

A wireless stack designed for embedded applications
UbiquiOS supports common embedded software environments (Renesas Synergy, VxWorks, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, ARM mbed) and is extremely compact. Alternative solutions can consume five times more resources than the UbiquiOS stack.

For example, UbiquiOS provides a full network stack from hardware to application layer with SoftMAC Wi-Fi in 16kB RAM and 60kB of Flash. UbiquiOS developers can also more easily migrate between MCUs (ARM Cortex-M, MIPS, x86/IA-32), PHYs and wireless protocols (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/Bluetooth Smart, cellular, LoRa, SIGFOX) as the need for product variants arises.

Verifying trust of IoT objects
Trusted Objects provides microcontroller-based authentication embedded in IoT devices, which efficiently protects the machine-to-machine (M2M) ecosystem. With Trusted Objects Secure Element support, developers using the UbiquiOS stack will be able to interface wirelessly to IoT devices with additional protection against a rogue or malicious device compromising the security of their system, network or data.