Setting the blueprint for secure onboarding of IoT devices

The growth of IoT can be seen across almost every industry and for good reason, IoT adoption is enabling digital transformation, facilitating new business models and improving efficiencies across the board.

But while IoT offers businesses a host of benefits, the proliferation of connected devices means that many are developed without much attention to security standards and protocols making this data vulnerable to attacks from cybercriminals. In fact, according to research conducted by Palo Alto Network, 57% of IoT devices are vulnerable to attacks of medium to high severity.

A roadblock to ensuring secure use of IoT lies with onboarding the necessary edge resources for future secure operation. This task has remained extremely complex due to operating through multiple domains. We wanted to rethink how the industry approaches the onboarding of IoT devices and offer a solution that delivers supply chain integrity with a proven, secure, and seamless process.

We recently joined forces with tech giants, Infineon, Microsoft Azure and GlobalSign, to create a zero-touch provisioning blueprint for IoT, delivering supply chain integrity with proven, secure, and seamless device onboarding. The partnership addresses these challenges with a collaborative and coordinated effort from multiple domain experts, to simplify and enhance large scale, secure rollouts of devices. This is completed through the implementation of a “chain of trust”, from a device, as it connects to the gateway, and finally then into the cloud.

Reducing the complexity of IoT device onboarding with zero-touch provisioning

Vastly reducing the complexity that comes with embedding strong certificate identities in cloud connected device architectures, this solution delivers a blueprint for the management of standard-based digital identities over the life cycle of the device – from manufacturing, provisioning, maintenance, and finally decommissioning.

By standardizing the security process and facilitating zero-touch provisioning, we have enabled faster rollout times, as well as significantly reducing the risk of human error in the process of IoT device onboarding. This solution comes as many organizations attempt to either secure devices themselves or decide not secure them at all – both of which put them at risk of attack. We are confident that this innovative partnership will provide businesses with piece of mind by helping to make connected devices a more secure place to operate.

The partnership marks our commitment as a company to cybersecurity and supporting our customers in reducing device complexity and management. We are looking forward to seeing our clients yield the benefits of this trail-blazing partnership as we operate across range of sectors including, transportation, medical, energy and utilities, defense and aerospace, and industrial and automation.