IoT Perspectives: News from Embedded Systems Design

We've been a broken record about IoT security, wondering where a vendor group was. Look no further. The Trusted Cmputing Group (TCG) has announced the availability of an architect's guide to its hardware-based TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 standard for IoT and other embedded security and which recently gained ISO certification.

TPM helps developers:

- Use hardware to provide stronger security and privacy protections than software based technologies.

- Create and protect the usage of cryptographic keys for security and privacy scenarios.

- Protect cryptographic private keys from being exported.

- Provide dictionary attack protection to prevent guessing PIN values used for authentication.

- Record and anonymously report the software loaded during the boot process.

Key improvements for TPM 2.0 over TPM 1.2 include:

- Supports more security and privacy scenarios with more algorithms.

- Allows easy expansion to support more cryptographic algorithms over time.

- Structured as a library of fundamental security and privacy primitives, ready to be adapted to new computing solutions and applications defined inside or outside the TCG.

- The TPM doesn’t need to be provisioned to be useful, for example, its cryptographic functions are always available.

- Privacy and security administration of the TPM are different functions.

- Flexible provisioning allows TPMs to be deployed with a secure by default or an opt-in provisioning model.

TCG offers an active Embedded Systems Work Group, which includes a committee dedicated to IoT security. That work group also has published a new spec for the TPM in automotive security.

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