Practical Internet of Things Security - Second Edition

Credential and attribute provisioning

Once the foundation for identities within the device is established, provisioning of operational credentials and attributes can occur. These are the credentials that will be used within an IoT system for secure communication, authentication, and integrity protection. We strongly recommend using certificates for authentication and authorization whenever possible. If using certificates, an important and security-relevant consideration is whether to generate the key pairs on the device itself or centrally.

Some IoT services allow for central (such as by a key server) generation of public/private key pairs. While this can be an efficient method of bulk-provisioning thousands of devices with credentials, care ...