Security for Iot

Security for IoT

Segger launches new IoT Security middleware for embedded developers

Tamworth, Staffs and Hilden, Germany 21st October 2015

Phaedrus Systems is now supplying new software from Segger that provides tools for creating the Secure Internet of Things. The software includes Cyclic Redundancy Checking (emLib CRC), an IPv6 TCP/IP stack (embOS/IP) with Secure Sockets Layer (emSSL)and a digital signature suite (emSecure-ECDSA). They are joined by a new data compression tool (emCompress) and a tool for digitally signing and verifying documents (emSecure Sign and Verify).

Chris Hills, CTO of Phaedrus Systems, said, "These software elementsextend Segger's offerings for the Secure Internet of Things. Since they come from a single supplier they are easy to integrate."

The complete Segger offering, including the new Segger's new IDE, the Embedded Studio, will be the centre piece of Phaedrus Systems presence at the IoT Security Foundation Conference on December 1st at the IET.

Cyclic Redundancy Check

Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRCs) provide error detection on data transfers in digital networks and on data held on storage devices or computed over firmware images. emLib CRC is a CRC library that in additionto the general CRC functions, features optimizedimplementations for popular CRC polynomials including CRCCCITT,CRC-16, and CRC-32, which perform close to thetheoretical limit and comparable to hardware-acceleratedalgorithms.emLib CRC is delivered as pure C source code. and iseasily integrated into PC programs and embedded targets as well as apps forportable devices such as Android or iOS tablets and phones.

TCP/IP Stack

The embOS/IP TCP/IP stack now supports the IPv6 protocol suite and has new features to meet the requirements ofthe Internet of Things and to cope withthe exponential growth of connecteddevices. Existing users can easily enhancetheir product with IPv6 whilstmaintaining full compatibility with theirexisting IPv4 source code and protocols. The enhanced embOS/IP Web Server makes better, more efficient use of memory -it's possible to run the web server with a lower overall memory footprint yet provide flexible content delivery when serving pages. Webpages with dynamic content, eliminate reloading the whole page whencontent changes. This ensures a smoother user experience.

Secure Sockets

emSSL is a secure socket implementation, suitable both for servers and clients. It has been designed to work with a minimum of RAM: as little as 7KB is all that is needed on the client. This makes it appropriate for devices for the IoT which need to communicate through email or by serving web pages, yet still have to be small and inexpensive.While working seamlessly with the embOS TCP/IP stack and the embOS/IP Web Server it can also be used with any IP stack that supports plain sockets.

Digital Signatures

The emSecure softwarepackage now offers both RSA and ECDSA schemes to generate and verify digital signatures. Thiswidens customer options when usingemSecure to protect against firmwarehacking and hardware cloning.While RSA has proven robust for decades, ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital SignatureAlgorithm) is a relatively modern algorithm, and a FIPS and IEEE standard. It provides the same level of security as RSA with shorter key lengths. A 256-bit ECDSA key is equivalent to a 2048-bit RSA key. Shorter keys not only savespace - the underlying calculations of the algorithms may be completed faster. Thisespecially applies to signature generation, which is about seven times fastercompared to RSA and makes it possible to sign data even on small microprocessorsvery quickly with low power.

emSecure-ECDSA uses about 10 kByte of ROM and no static RAM.Signature verification can be done within 160 ms, with less than 2.5 kByte on thestack, measured on a Cortex-M and using the P-256 curve.

Compression

emCompress is a compression tool to reduce the storage required on atarget for boot images, HTML files or other staticdata. It reduces flash memory sizes, costs and data transmission time. Data is compressed on a PC, which automatically picks the bestalgorithm for the memory available.

The compressed version is stored in the flash of the target. Decompression takes place on the target side, whenever it is needed and using very littleRAM. ROM consumption is tiny, compared to the additional spacethat is available to the development engineer for new firmware features. Highly redundant data, such as HTML pages, can be compressed tono more than 10% of the original size, and a unique group mode, which boostscompression ratios when compressing many small files such as HTML content forembedded web servers.

emCompress is written in ISO-C and is both compiler andtarget independent.

Sign & Verify

Sign and Verify is a Windowsapplication which digitally signs adocument to protect it from beingmaliciously altered. The utility isdelivered with a key generator and is free of charge forpersonal use.

All these products are available now from Phaedrus Systems

###

SEGGER Microcontrollerdevelops and distributes hardware and software development tools as well as software components for embedded systems.

Phaedrus Systems is the UK’s leading specialist in the support of engineers at all stages of embedded safety-critical and high-integrity projects. Tools available include requirements capture for IEC 61508, EN 50128 and nuclear applications; requirements tracking and competency tools; estimation software; SIL3 RTOS; hi-rel embedded database; compiler validation reports and reliability/failure software. Consultants have experience working on automotive, rail and aerospace applications, meeting standards such as IEC 61508 SIL4, and D0178B. Backing these is a wide range of other relevant embedded tools.

Phaedrus Systems is based in Tamworth, Staffordshire. More information is available on the website