What Does IoT Mean For Digital Certificates?

IoT is a technology that fosters good customer experience by enabling digital transformation of business with platform and product offerings. IoT involves the management of the millions of devices connected to the internet and volume of personal information that is being collected, analyzed and stored. So the connected world offers the risk for malicious exploitation through remote capture and control.

According to the Forrester Report “

The State Of IoT Security 2020 – There is a growing risk of Awareness of IoT Threats, But Deployments Are Still at Risk. Failing to do secure deployments will lead to increase data loss, Physical damage and revenue loss.

When there is a whole excitement in the IoT adoption among enterprises for various use cases there needs to be a balanced approach of the utility with Security and Risk. So the key factors to determine the IoT devices security are the buzz words of Digital identity, authentication and encryption

The foundation will rely on a mechanism to assist a technology organization with deploying next generation methods with the devices and the IoT connected world. The key solution and the answer is “Digital Certificates”

The Tech Radar report of Forrester also predicts that Digital Certificates will grow in the next 3-5 years

The digital Certificates are technologically advanced in terms of protection offering to the devices – specifically when the volumes of devices are increasing on a daily basis. There are certain features of digital certificates which offer great benefits to the end consumers.

The key features that the Digital certificate needs to be defined for IOT ecosystem are Version of the certificate. Certificates for the IOT would be restricted to Version 3. The Serial number is an important requirement of certificates. In an IOT support system the number should be positive and also be as small as possible.

For the IoT security to be robust for IOT – Signature Algorithm is a key facet which should be unique and restricted to one algorithm. The next critical business aspect for IoT is the issuing authority – It should contain a common name. The IoT ecosystem is moving from experimentation to business scale the validity of the Digital signature is important. The longer the validity the better it is for the devices and it should have UTC time format.

When the certificates are issued for the various devices the unique ID is a valid parameter. This makes the subjects also unique with each transaction.  So we have seen why Digital Certificates are a key component of the IoT connected world. While we have bit discussed the features of the digital certificates, following the compression specification using technology is a compliance requirement.

The hardware specifications for some IoT devices may limit or prevent their ability to utilize digital certificates. We need to overcome to this issue and provide robust mechanism to load certificates on the IoT devices. This process can be simple and it can be implemented during the manufacturing of the device.

The reduction in size of the certificate by compression should not compromise on the security of the protocol. All the design decisions have to be taken with security in mind. We can also rely on the current cryptographic protocols to make the digital certificates more robust. So some of the recommendation is to use strong hashing algorithm

The digital signature should also be intrinsically adaptable to every environment of digital identity. Also the development process should be completely automated. As we see a lot of movement in DevSecOps even in the IoT enablement using Digital signature should be free of human monitoring. 

“Automate Security for the exponential growth of the IoT keys and certificates” – Get the real time access to vital information