Building control systems to communicate security with IoT cloud

IBM Watson IoT Platform is a managed, cloud-hosted service designed to enable companies to quickly connect and derive value from their IoT devices. It enables organisations to capture and explore data for devices, equipment, and machines, and discover insights that can drive better decision-making.

Adesto’s open, extensible SmartServer IoT simplifies the complexities of interoperability between the diverse set of legacy systems, disparate devices, and the numerous emerging and traditional protocols in industrial and building automation to enable seamless and secure access to data. It provides built-in device and data management for sensors, meters, actuators and controllers through a growing range of protocols including BACnet, LonWorks and Modbus.

NXP's A71CH that is ‘ready for IBM Watson IoT’ is an off-the-shelf solution that provides a Root of Trust (RoT) at the chip level and delivers chip-to-cloud security right out of the box. Through integration with Adesto’s SmartServer IoT, it enables customers with additional security when connecting their buildings to IBM’s Watson IoT Platform without exposing keys for the lifetime of a device.

“While the IoT holds great promise, the connectivity of everything also creates significant vulnerabilities. Connected devices are potential targets for unauthorised network access, malicious control, and data theft,” said Philippe Dubois, Vice President and General Manager of IoT security at NXP. “We believe that IoT security must be silicon-based, and easy to implement. With the A71CH Plug & Trust Secure Element, we’re making it simple for customers to securely connect a plurality of air-gapped devices into the IBM public cloud.”

“IBM Watson IoT enables customers to maximise the value of their physical assets,” said Sanjay Tripathi, VP of Strategy and Business Development, IBM IoT. “We are continuing to grow the ecosystem of enabling technologies around this platform to provide even greater value. By working with NXP to ensure its A71CH secure element is pre-loaded with the certificates needed to connect to IBM Watson IoT, we’re helping customers streamline their chip-to-cloud security and device onboarding. We are also working with Adesto to provide the critical connection from our customers’ industrial data to our platform. Through these relationships, we’re letting customers concentrate more fully on extracting the business value from their data.”

“Adesto is focused on making it easy for our industrial IoT customers to embrace their legacy environments, extend their edge devices with emerging technologies and enhance their solutions through deep insights from cloud analytics platforms like IBM Cloud,” said Sohrab Modi, Chief Strategy Officer, Adesto.

“Our SmartServer IoT provides the key that lets customers unlock their industrial data. NXP’s security solution adds the desired level of security and comfort for customers to adopt public clouds and benefit from the IBM Watson IoT Platform.. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with IBM and NXP to make this exciting combined solution available to customers.”

NXP’s A71CH Plug & Trust Secure Element that is ‘ready for IBM Watson IoT’ features X.509 certificates and keys trusted by Watson IoT Platform and injected at NXP secure certified facilities. NXP’s trust provisioning service ensures keys are kept safe, and credentials are injected in a trusted environment. When embedded into devices, the chips have the necessary keys to establish a secure TLS connection with IBM Watson IoT enabling seamless device-to-cloud connections.