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Keywords: Industrial IoT Edge Device Deployment, Industrial IoT Device Onboarding, FIDO Alliance, Zero Trust Security
Overview
Digital transformation at the industrial IoT edge faces several hurdles to widespread implementation. Connectivity to legacy industrial devices and the myriad protocols supported remains a formidable obstacle in many installations. The ability to securely deploy, scale, and manage software-defined functionality across hundreds if not thousands of edge devices has likewise been a stubbornly costly and resource-intensive struggle that has impeded adoption to date.
The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is endeavoring to enable automatic onboarding of edge devices via their FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) standard and certifications. Originally formed as an open industry association focused on reducing reliance on passwords through development and promotion of standards-based, phishing-resistant passkeys, the IoT Technical Working Group within the organization has defined a new open standard for secure automated onboarding of IoT devices. This effort is coordinated with Linux Foundation Edge (LF Edge), a software community focused on building an Open Source Framework for the Edge. The technical editors of the FDO working group, including representatives from Arm, Amazon Web Services, Google, Infineon, Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm, sought to bring IT-inspired automatic onboarding techniques to all manner of IoT devices, including industrial.
The FDO approach has great potential to overcome existing obstacles to efficient device onboarding by providing a secure, zero-touch, late-binding process that does not require skilled technicians to implement. This capability can be of great benefit to technology suppliers and customers alike and is currently being implemented at ExxonMobil’s Open Process Automation Lighthouse facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Challenges to Device Onboarding
In a digitally transformed architecture, all manner of edge-enabled hardware must be capable of connecting to and interacting with the associated device management platform, whether on-prem, in the cloud, or hybrid. This platform is used for a variety of different purposes, ranging from data retrieval and analysis to updating and patching device software. Device onboarding is the term used to describe connecting edge devices to a management platform and establishing the required credentials for operation. Without automatic onboarding, this task must be performed manually by a skilled technician on each device and can easily escalate into a slow, costly, inefficient, and insecure process that is difficult to manage and scale.
Several edge software solutions have targeted automated device onboarding, but availability of an industry standard potentially removes onboarding as a differentiator and enables focus on more value-added capabilities. Many of the existing solutions require knowledge of the ultimate customer and use case prior to installation.
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