Mountain View, Calif., April 21, 2021: The FIDO Alliance today announced the launch of the FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) protocol, a new, open IoT standard that “enables devices to simply and securely onboard to Cloud and on-premise management platforms.” Through this standard, the FIDO Alliance said it will address challenges of security, cost and complexity tied to IoT device deployment at scale.
The FIDO Alliance’s FDO specification for IoT was collaboratively developed to solve the issue of IoT security in onboarding – just as it has done with its FIDO authentication standards to help address the global data breach problem. The FDO specification has reached Proposed Standard status and is open and free to implement. Initially, the specification is targeted at industrial and commercial applications. Developers can view and download the specification at https://fidoalliance.org/specifications/download-iot-specifications/
A Standard for Fast, Secure IoT Device Onboarding
FDO is an automated onboarding protocol for IoT devices, leveraging asymmetric public key cryptography to provide the industrial IoT industry with a fast and secure way to onboard any device to any device management system.
The business benefits from the FIDO Device Onboard standard include:
- Simplicity – Businesses no longer have to pay more for the lengthy and highly technical installation process than they do for the devices themselves. The highly automated FDO process can be carried out by people of any level of experience quickly and efficiently.
- Flexibility – Businesses can decide which cloud platforms they want to onboard devices to at the point of installation (as opposed to manufacture). A single device SKU can be onboarded to any platform, thereby greatly simplifying the device supply chain.
- Security – FDO leverages an “untrusted installer” approach, which means the installer no longer needs – nor do they have access to – any sensitive infrastructure/access control information to add a device to a network.
This is the latest FIDO Alliance initiative in its mission to reduce the world’s reliance on passwords with simpler, stronger authentication that prevents scalable attacks and account takeovers. FIDO Device Onboard was developed through the work of the Alliance’s IoT Technical Working Group, led by co-chairs Richard Kerslake, Intel, Giridhar Mandyam, Qualcomm and vice chair Geof Cooper, Intel. Additional companies with specification editors including Arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft.
Image credit: FIDO Alliance