GMO GlobalSign, a global Certificate Authority and provider of identity and security solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced the launch of its IoT Identity Platform addressing critical IoT device security requirements. GlobalSign said its new set of products and services are flexible and scalable enough to issue and manage billions of identities for IoT devices of all types. Using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) as the core identity mechanism, the IoT Identify Platform can serve the varied security use-cases of the IoT across all verticals, including manufacturing, agriculture, smart grid, payments, IoT gateways, healthcare, other industrial ecosystems and more. The Platform supports the full device identity lifecycle, from initial certificate provisioning (both greenfield and brownfield deployments) to lifetime maintenance through to final sunsetting, decommissioning or transfer of ownership. Giving each device or endpoint a unique identity allows them to get authenticated when they come online and then throughout their lifetime, prove their integrity, and securely communicate with other devices, services and users.
The central feature of the Platform is IoT Edge Enroll, a full-fledged enrollment client used to provision and manage PKI-based identities to IoT devices of all types. Providing these unique identities to all devices enables trust within the ecosystem, allowing for mutual authentication between devices and systems as well as protecting communications from eavesdropping or tampering. IoT Edge Enroll provides a flexible and scalable way to deploy these identities and maintain them throughout the full device lifecycle, with added features such as device Registration Authority (RA), certificate lifecycle management, and expanded protocol support. The cloud-based IoT Identity Platform needs a way to communicate with end devices to deliver, validate and revoke identities, and IoT Edge Enroll acts as the enrollment mechanism.
“The GlobalSign IoT Identity Platform greatly improves the process of identity lifecycle management, from enabling customers to use our highly scalable managed PKI solution as an identity issuing engine to full-fledged enrollment and flexible API integrations with other application and platforms,” said Lancen LaChance, VP, IoT Solutions, GlobalSign. “The Platform meets a tremendous need in the marketplace as security is essential to IoT ecosystems, and is well-suited to low-cost IoT device implementations. Currently, we have a number of early adopter companies using the IoT Identity Platform with very positive results.”