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Ockam provides easy to deploy identity, trust, and interoperability for IoT developers

  • January 12, 2019

Maybe you’re not going to buy a $7,000 smart toilet, but the Internet of Things (IoT) is on its way to your home and office. Silly gadgets aside, IoT device inventors face many programming challenges. It’s hard adding identity, trust, and interoperability to IoT hardware. The Ockam startup will change this for the better.

Customers want IoT devices to be trustworthy and work with other vendors gear. Programmers know that’s easier said than done. Many IoT vendors’ answer is to not bother to add sufficient security or interoperability to their gadgets. This leads to one IoT security problem after another.

Ockam’s answer is to make it easy to add identity, trust, and interoperability by providing programmers with the open-source, Apache-licensed Ockam Software Developer Kit (SDK). With it, developers can add these important features to their devices without a deep understanding of secure IoT network architecture or cryptographic key identity management.

Also: Internet of Things (IoT): Cheat sheet TechRepublic

This is provided by a Golang library and a Command Line Interface (CLI). Additional languages, features, and tools will be supported in future releases.

Once properly embedded within a device’s firmware, the Ockam SDK enables the device to become an Ockam Blockchain Network (OBN) client. OBN provides a decentralized, open platform with high throughput and low latency. It also provides the infrastructure and protocols underpinning Ockam’s SDK.

Devices are assigned a unique Decentralized ID (DID). The DID is cryptographically secure identities for an array of entities. While used primarily to identify devices, it can also represent people, organizations, or other entities. With this, developers can codify complex graph relationships between people, organizations, devices, and assets.

Once on OBN, devices can can share data as verified claims with any other registered network device. This is secured by Ockam-provided, blockchain-powered Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).  Devices can also verify data that they receive from other registered OBN IoT devices. OBN is free of charge for developers until its general availability release later this year.

This may all sound complex, but the complexities are hidden away behind its serverless architecture: A developer only needs the SDK. OBN’s complications, such as PKI, are abstracted away.

Some of Ockam’s structure may sound familiar. That’s because it’s taking a page from Twilio. Just like Twilio provides a common layer between telecommunications infrastructure and developers, to make it easy to incorporate messaging into applications, Ockam provides a “common rail” for adding secure identify to IoT devices. With a single line of code, Ockam enables developer to provision an immutable identity to a device.

Also: 7 ways to use Alexa around the office CNET

OBN is built on Microsoft Azure confidential compute. Microsoft Engineering is a dedicated technical partner, and Ockam CEO Matthew Gregory led Azure’s open-source software developer platform strategy.

Together, Ockam and OBN provides a backbone for the next generation of high performance IoT ecosystems. Ockam is interoperable and built for multi-party IoT networks. So, in theory, your devices will be able to work with other vendor’s gear.

According to Yorke Rhodes, co-founder of blockchain at Microsoft Azure: “Ockam’s team is best in class, bringing together skills and experience in enterprise, IoT, secure compute, scale-up, and Azure. We are thrilled to be collaborating with them on their innovative solution for the IoT developer community.”

I don’t know about “thrilled,” but I do know if I were building IoT devices, which I want to work and play well and securely with other devices, I’d be working with Ockam. It promises to make high-quality IoT development much easier.












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Article source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ockam-provides-easy-to-deploy-identity-trust-and-interoperability-for-iot-developers/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

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