>> ARM PURCHASES POLARSSL - BRINGING TLS TO MBED OS

It was clear security was a concern for IoT; now companies are acting.

ARM, in a move to bring its mbedOS to the market complete with security has announced the acquisition of PolarSSL a Dutch company focusing on providing transport layer security (TLS) to embedded controllers. It plans to re-brand the PolarSSL library and offer it to developers to purchase on its own or as part of the mbed OS platform.

PolarSSL is open source is has been offered dual licensing (GPLv2 and proprietary) - specifically designed for embedded with more recent versions offering abstraction layers for memory allocation and threading to work more efficiently with embedded operating systems.

PolarSSL is currently available for a number of operating systems and on chip-sets include ARM, x86, PowerPC, MIPS - one must question if this acquisition will any impact on supporting additional (competitive) chip-sets or remain chipset-independent?

ARM plans to make the re-branded library (ARM mbed TLS) support both TLS and DTLS (data-gram) and have it compliment its Crytobox technology; which is effectively a trusted storage area on chip within hardware deployments utilizing ARM and mbed OS.

There is still a question of how many low-powered IoT deployments will be be capable of supporting ARM mbed TLS - as a full blown TLS/DTLS library will require a significant program and memory footprint - so there is definitely still opportunity for streamlined solutions.