A Firmware Update Architecture for Internet of Things
draft-ietf-suit-architecture-15
SUIT B. Moran
Internet-Draft H. Tschofenig
Intended status: Informational Arm Limited
Expires: July 22, 2021 D. Brown
Linaro
M. Meriac
Consultant
January 18, 2021
A Firmware Update Architecture for Internet of Things
draft-ietf-suit-architecture-15
Abstract
Vulnerabilities with Internet of Things (IoT) devices have raised the
need for a solid and secure firmware update mechanism that is also
suitable for constrained devices. Incorporating such update
mechanism to fix vulnerabilities, to update configuration settings as
well as adding new functionality is recommended by security experts.
This document lists requirements and describes an architecture for a
firmware update mechanism suitable for IoT devices. The architecture
is agnostic to the transport of the firmware images and associated
meta-data.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on July 22, 2021.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
Moran, et al. Expires July 22, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft A Firmware Update Architecture for IoT January 2021
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Conventions and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Agnostic to how firmware images are distributed . . . . . 7
3.2. Friendly to broadcast delivery . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3. Use state-of-the-art security mechanisms . . . . . . . . 8
3.4. Rollback attacks must be prevented . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.5. High reliability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.6. Operate with a small bootloader . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.7. Small Parsers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.8. Minimal impact on existing firmware formats . . . . . . . 10
3.9. Robust permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.10. Operating modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.11. Suitability to software and personalization data . . . . 12
4. Claims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5. Communication Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
6. Manifest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
7. Device Firmware Update Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
7.1. Single CPU SoC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
7.2. Single CPU with Secure - Normal Mode Partitioning . . . . 18
7.3. Dual CPU, shared memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
7.4. Dual CPU, other bus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8. Bootloader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
9. Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
11. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
12. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
13. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Show full document text