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Why have updates?
More devices are getting 24/7 connected. Often this means life gets easier for users, but sometimes also for bad guys, like hackers. They are constantly able to scan for possible means of abuse on more and more devices. Just search the internet for stories about hacked cameras, home appliances and other connected IoT devices. Most of these cases are possible because devices are badly configured and possibly never get updated.
Devices or software which is not updated regularly can be seen as possibly vulnerable because most systems are composed of various libraries in which security issues are found over time. Those issues were probably not known yet during development.
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Why choose Jidiot?
We have been active in the firmware update business for more than 7 years now. Under our supervision, we have enabled thousands of devices to be reliably updatable. As we think this should be one of the most important things to have support for in your products, we created a dedicated product for this. This allows for your device to be remotely controllable in a secure, reliable and proven way, without the need for significant engineering support from your own teams. We have already invested more than 3 and a half man-years in our update eco-system and accompanying test- and reference implementations. The eco-system also includes in-depth testing frameworks that can be used to actually prove the device (firmware) is always updatable (or can be downgraded).
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What we can help you with?
- Device firmware updates & subdevice updates (microcontroller)
- Firmware design and development
- Advice on what to do and what not and why
- Testing framework(s) for your embedded devices
- Device management server
- Remote diagnostics
- Integration and consulting about any of the bullet points above in existing products or environments
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Key Features
Our system, if fully implemented, consists of three main components.
Device agent
Our device agent component is running in each device. It will allow the device to connect to one or more backends to communicate and execute any firmware change or configured actions. The device takes the initiative to connect to the backend at regular intervals (also configurable). This way the devices are not exposed to the outside world and this keeps our system design simpler as well. Communication between the device agent and the backend will always be encrypted using HTTPS/TLS. This means that also in highly firewalled and regulated networks our system can still function.
Device firmware package generator
This component contains a reference example environment from where you can easily create a customer-specific device firmware image. It can optionally run in a Docker container so that only a dependency on docker is required to develop your firmware. The package generator can be used to build all required sub-components based on configurable input components and customer specific changes or additions. It can upload any created package to a testing system or directly to any of the set up back ends. There is also support for automatic generation of differential firmware packages, signed/encrypted firmware packages and version information control. The package generator can incorporate any Yocto, Buildroot or practically any known Linux build platform artifacts as well.
Backend
Our backend is the central place where all devices connect and where all firmware packages can be stored. Based on the size of your device-pool, there can be multiple backend instances of course. CDN-hosted firmware packages are also supported from our systems and components. If you choose for our manged backend hosting, we can scale the backend as soon as required and also pro-actively monitor it. Alarms can be triggered for any device anomalies. For example, alarms sent on Telegram, email and calling external APIs. We setup separate private servers for every customer. On request we can optionally support running our software on your server platform/location of choice
Feel free to contact us directly at:
jaap@jcz.nl
Copyright © [2023] Jidiot