Tag Archive for: over-the-air updates

Building Platforms with Secure Over-the-Air Updating

Almost every device in development today requires both over-the-air (OTA) updating capabilities, and up-to-date security with authentication of the device filesystem and encryption of application data storage.

At Konsulko Group, we find that the best approach is to build a secure platform first, starting with the hardware root of trust and establishing a chain of trust by extending the root of trust through each successive component in the system.

  • A first step is to make sure the Universal Boot Loader (U-Boot) is up-to-date. If the device is using an older version, we may port U-Boot support of a more current release. Then we enable signature-based authentication of the device using the U-Boot verified boot feature.
  • To provide authentication of the device filesystem and encryption of application data storage, we often use the Linux kernel Device-Mapper infrastructure to create virtual layers of block devices: dm-verity for root filesystem authentication, dm-crypt for data encryption, and dm-integrity for read/write data volume integrity.
  • Finally, we can integrate Mender I/O support for OTA together with dm-verity and Yocto Project so that device updates can be performed while maintaining the system’s secure chain of trust.

This step-by-step methodology ensures straight-forward and predictable development. Please contact us to discuss how we can help you build a secure platform for OTA updating on your device.

How Mender works

by Tom Rini, VP Engineering

Software Update solutions are a key part of our services offering. For open source over-the-air updates, we often we recommend and work with mender.io. In fact, Konsulko Group is a Mender Authorized Referral Partner. Recently, a prospective customer expressed an interest in knowing more about how Mender works. Here’s the brief, informal introduction to member.io that I prepared, and now I’m sharing with you.

As a high level starting point, https://mender.io/how-it-works provides a good overview of what’s supported and what it covers. In short, Mender starts off by providing support for a traditional “A/B” approach to system updates, where if the update isn’t marked as valid (and there’s hooks for the application(s) to verify the system before this is done), it’s assumed invalid and the system will roll-back automatically. While “OTA” implies over the network, it can just as easily be done by providing (and validating) a USB key that contains an update.

One of the reasons we recommend Mender is that it has very good in-depth documentation. The starting point for all of that is https://docs.mender.io/2.4/ which covers all of the topic starting from how to implement Mender support in a device and including how to create your own server infrastructure if you don’t want to use their paid service. While there are a number of important pages there, one that I like to highlight is https://docs.mender.io/2.4/artifacts/state-scripts as it shows the state machine for an update and talks about some of the common use cases that come up for user interaction or dealing with failures.

Another place I want to call out is https://docs.mender.io/2.4/devices/update-modules which is also mentioned in the first link. This is how Mender is extended to provide updates for other parts of the system that are not the rootfs itself.  Since updating a Docker container is something that has been mentioned before I want to also note https://hub.mender.io/t/docker/324 as it is a well supported module for this specific case.

I hope you find this information useful. Please contact us if you have specific questions. We’re looking forward to talking to you about your own specific OTA needs.

Now a Mender Authorized Referral Partner

As Embedded Linux pioneers, Konsulko Group is excited to work with Mender.io, a leader in open source over-the-air (OTA) software updates. Konsulko has already completed several successful projects for our customers using Mender end-to-end OTA software update manager. 

As a Mender Authorized Referral Partner we believe we can give our customers robust and secure open source OTA solutions that can be extended for large scale software deployments.

Please contact Konsulko Group directly to see how we can integrate open source over-the-air software updates into your next product.

Please read more on Mender’s blog.