u-blox Launches IoT Security-as-a-Service offering
u-blox has commercially launched its IoT Security-as-a-Service offering on both the u-blox SARA-R4 and SARA-R5 series of LTE-M cellular IoT modules. This innovative solution makes it extremely simple to protect data from malicious third parties, both on the device and during transmission from the device to the cloud.
“We implemented a true end-to-end concept that protects data from the device to the end-user without making it visible to intermediate nodes or platforms, or service providers. The modules’ symmetric KMS offers engineers a streamlined and scalable alternative to conventional public key infrastructure or pre-shared key arrangements,” says Giovanni Solito, Senior Product Manager, Product Center Services at u-blox. “And with straightforward on boarding to all the popular cloud IoT platforms, efforts are not taken up by security concerns and operational complexities, but can be focused on speeding up time to market and growing business.”
The IoT Security-as-a-Service offering, which is managed via the u-blox Thingstream service delivery platform, is specifically optimized for low power wide area (LPWA) deployments that use resource-constrained IoT devices. Among the relevant use cases that u-blox IoT Security-as-a-Service can support are:
- Asset tracking – Data authenticity is essential in such scenarios, as well as secure local storage of collected data and easy secure cloud on boarding. Because tracking devices are usually battery-powered, they require extremely energy-efficient secure data transmission.
- Connected health / eHealth – In this use case, patient confidentiality is paramount, with only authorized medical staff permitted to access sensitive data. This necessitates a high degree of protection against malware and data tampering.
- Industrial monitoring – These solutions need to guarantee the integrity of real-time operational data to increase productivity, avoid downtime, and assure the safety of the workforce.
- Building and home automation – Data confidentiality and authenticity need to be maintained while allowing for data to be shared with trusted stakeholders without compromising customer privacy.
- Telematics – In this scenario, the main security risks include denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, device cloning, jamming, etc.
- Smart metering – Here, the authenticity of data logged by remote metering units needs to be confirmed to protect billing, and, once trusted communication is established, data transmission needs to be restricted to authorized servers.
