I have worked with a number of IoT development kits that get connected to cloud-based services, and the process is pretty much the same in terms of linking devices together. There is a way to set up an account on the cloud and then an entry must be created for the device under test. There are usually some keywords, passphrases, or other forms of identification involved that must be set in the device or obtained from the device and entered in the cloud. This essentially provides the secure link information to the software.
Of course, the developer needs to know what URLs are involved in the sign-up process, as well as what information is involved. The process works and is not bad for a developer, but definitely isn’t much fun for a customer.
Intel’s Secure Device Onboard (SDO) is an automated service is designed handle this linkage of IoT devices to cloud services in a secure, standardized fashion (Fig. 1). Everything starts with a device that is given an Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) when it is created. The EPID is essentially a private crypto key that can be used to generate secure credentials. A device and EPID are paired with a 128-bit Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). GUIDs have been used for a long time to identify everything from an object to a software service. A device’s GUID is effectively its public name while the EPID is the secret.