IoT Edge Controller: Trusted Identity at the Device Level

On Tuesday, ForgeRock announced  the availability of its IoT Edge Controller, which provides consumer and industrial organizations with the ability to deliver trusted identity at the device level.  

The ForgeRock IoT Edge Controller 

The ForgeRock IoT Edge Controller, now available as open source software under the Apache 2.0 License, enables customers and partners to build industry-specific solutions with additional functionality, and ultimately drive higher levels of interoperability. By delivering an open source edge controller, ForgeRock allows businesses to include digital identities as part of products and significantly accelerate time-to-market of new IoT solutions. ForgeRock supports integrations with the major IoT platforms to deliver employee, customer and device identity management as well as the complex relationships between them. 

Connected Devices - Opportunity or Risk?

The Internet of Things (IoT) already affects many industries, as connected devices streamline business processes and add entirely new revenue streams for global organizations. By connecting devices with systems, data, and people, organizations can introduce more personalized, automated, and enhanced experiences for their customers.

ForgeRock recognizes that “things” can have the same identity capabilities as traditional (customer or employee) identities, and can engage in their own complex identity relationships. A thing can be a service, system, application, data source -- any thing that interacts with a human operator or organization. These things communicate via cloud, mobile, social, and legacy platforms to request or provide information, send commands, and help manage complex automated process. 

It is important for companies to have a trusted Identity in their connected devices. No organization wants to make a decision based upon information they cannot trust.  It is critical in lifecycle management of the device or product. And it is necessary to log these devices for audit reasons. 

The release of the IoT Edge specifically benefits companies in the following three ways:

  1. Different industries have different requirements. Being able to work with OSS allows adoption to industry specific needs prior to a purchasing decision. Among many this is important for health care, transportation, or even avionics.

  2. Devices, Gateways and Edge computers come in many flavors from many different vendors. Making the IEC available as OSS allows these vendors to pre-integrate a trusted Identity compatible with a market leading Identity and access management system making them literally plug and play compatible with the ForgeRock platform.

  3. Adoption to different root credentials. Hardware-, Certificate-, File-based,  are just a few. Any other type of highly differentiated/unique signature can serve as root credential to generate the highest possible level of trust in existing installations.

 

The ForgeRock IoT Edge delivers identity-driven security by creating trusted identities and ensuring the ongoing authenticity and authorization of connected devices, their transactions, their data streams, as well as ecosystems at the edge. It runs on smart edge devices, and provides the privacy, integrity, and security required for devices to register as identities in the ForgeRock Identity Platform.

 

Find out more about ForgeRock’s commitment to IoT here.


Blog Contributor: Robert Vamosi

Who’s Robert?  He is an award-winning writer and author of two books on privacy and the identity of people and things.  As Senior Product Marketing Manager at ForgeRock he is extending our customer story into the cloud. Robert is a runner with thirteen marathons to his credit, and contemplating his next race.