TrustPoint’s secure authentication solution is the most efficient and trusted form of M2M secure authentication in the market today, providing end users and buyers in the M2M market increased confidence and assurance in the authenticity of the product or service.
Digital certificates are used to reinforce the trust in a communication system. However, today’s Certificate Authorities (CAs), who create and issue these certificates, are rigid and only suited to one specific task. The only large-scale CA infrastructures are those that target Transport Layer Security (TLS) authentication and are designed to issue X.509 certificates for Web Servers. There are several CA companies offering these types of certificates but they are not suited to the needs of M2M authentication where high volume, low cost device certificates are required for the embedded market:
1. Cost is far too high.
2. They are rigid in certificate format, algorithm and policy.
3. They do not provide an efficient and cost effective delivery to manufactures of M2M devices.
4. They are typically not well suited for environments where memory and bandwidth are constrained.
There are CAs designed to issue device certificates for certain industries such as AACS (Blu-ray copy protection) and Zigbee 1.0. While these CAs are designed to meet the needs of their respective industries they can cost millions of dollars to establish, they are inefficient in delivery of certificates, and they cannot be re-used for other CA initiatives — they are restricted by their own certificate policy and certificate practice statements.
Purpose-built Certificate Authority
To address this distribution challenge, TrustPoint has developed a purpose-built CA that will enable users and organizations to utilize TrustPoint as their Managed Services CA to create certificates in high volume and at price points that support the deployment of cost effective end points within the M2M eco-system.
TrustPoint’s Managed Services CA is designed to meet the needs of customers who do not wish to host their own Certificate Authority. TrustPoint’s Managed Services CAs design and adherence to its strict Certificate Policy ensures secure, constant availability and key confidentiality. It is a Cloud Based solution that is hosted and maintained by TrustPoint. Each customer will have their own unique portal into TrustPoint’s system without decreasing the security of the solution or its manageability by the customer. As a result, it offers very high security and availability without the need for the customer to install, operate and maintain their own system, thus reducing IT support costs.