>> LIBCOMMAS - AUTHENTICATED MESSAGING FOR RESOURCE-LIMITED DEVICES

It seems the message of IoT security is gaining momentum as a must fix.

With security being a hot-topic in the IoT industry - it is natural to see efforts appear to help solve the problem; Saife, Inc recently published an open-source library of their own providing elliptic curve cryptographic (ECDSA) digital signing and industry accepted (SHA-2) hashing algorithms to provide a secure machine to machine messaging framework.

I have covered a number of IoT security topics, ranging from the discovery of commercial web cameras that get hacked to watch you, efforts to expose devices to hacking to expose design flaws, question the feasibility of implementing security into micro-controllers, efforts to create a secure bare-bones operating system through to the extreme concepts of modelling nature to provide a defensive mechanism within an IoT deployment.

The team hit the nail right on the head with their approach:

• Employing proven digital signing and hashing algorithms (ECDSA and SHA-2), a team was able to distill all of the components needed for authenticated messaging onto an extremely small, cheap, resource-constrained demonstration platform To do so, the team stripped away all of the unnecessary functionality of ECDSA and SHA-2 not related to security, and it also maximized the efficiency of the code.
  source: saife.com announcement blog post

The aforementioned "resource-constrained" platform is none other than the all mighty and cheap Arduino UNO (Atmel AVR 8-bit CPU with 2KB SRAM, 32KB flash, and 1KB EEPROM).

I am sure I could optimize the code a little from a code size and memory usage perspective (the use of EEPROM for memory isn't best practice) and look at a way of integrating it with what I have already done with RSA encryption - if only there were enough hours in the day!

The library, known as "libCommas" is hosted on github.com and has been released under the Apache version 2.0 open source license, a developer friendly license that allows for quick and easy adoption of open source into both commercial and non-commercial software. I am sure that their efforts will not go in vain and it will be of great assistance to many out there.