Zero Touch Secure Device On-boarding

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) has become the foundation of trending technology in this modern era. It has created many possibilities by integrating every object for interaction via embedded systems involving the transfer of data to and from servers. As IoT is becoming an essential part of human life, but with that there is an increase demand to provision devices and a need of assurance that the device is properly authenticated. In general, the process of on-boarding a device takes 20-50 minute, which involves co-ordination among installation technicians, network and security operations, that will configure the device and set the credentials to get the device on the network which can be costly and time consuming. The proposed technology scales IoT deployments to put more devices into service faster, by making it fully automated once on-boarded. It has a zero-touch approach, that makes IoT devices to dynamically discover the customer’s IoT platform at power. For testing purpose, the approach has been carried out with raspberry-pi which acts as device. When the device is first powered on it will connect to manufacturer server. The manufacturer server will insert the credentials and the address of the rendezvous server where it can connect next once it reaches the customer premises. Manufacturer server creates a digital ownership voucher which is then send to customer. At customer site when the device is powered on it is connected to rendezvous server which authenticates the device and it sends the address of the owner server to the device. The device is then connected to owner, the owner and device mutually authenticates themselves through secret messages and ownership voucher. Once the trust is made the device is owned by the owner. Thus, zero touch secure on-boarding is achieved. For validation purpose, the testing has been carried out with different configurations and functionality of code has been checked with the development of unit test case suit. The technology is using security framework which is using ARM Trust Zone.