Tern's Device Authority partners with DigiCert

Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) specialist company Tern announced on Wednesday that its subsidiary, Device Authority, has entered a strategic partnership with DigiCert, a global provider of trusted identity and authentication solutions, to provide enhanced device provisioning and credential management for the IoT.

The AIM-traded firm said the partnership will help expand and enable the range and type of IoT devices that can be secured with encryption, authentication and credential management.

It said managed PKI (public key infrastructure) services from DigiCert have revolutionised the cost and complexity of digital certificate infrastructure.

Those services now include support for smaller, lightweight, IoT devices.

Tern described DigiCert's systems as highly scalable and reliable, with the ability to provide support for “billions” of active certificates.

DigiCert already provides large-scale, certificate-based IoT implementations for healthcare, industrial and other critical infrastructure organisations.

To address the challenges of securing, deploying and managing PKI at IoT scale, Tern said Device Authority's Secure Credential Management solution will directly integrate with DigiCert to securely automate device certificate provisioning for low-computing devices.

Dynamic key generation and data-centric encryption will be integrated with DigiCert certificates to ensure that credentials are securely and efficiently delivered and rotated to authorised devices, preventing the use of stolen credentials and unauthorised devices.

“We're pleased to partner with Device Authority to align our complementary solutions in a way that provides additional value to our customers,” said DigiCert CTO Dan Timpson.

“Through this partnership, we will be able to enhance our current IoT device authentication, encryption and message integrity solutions and extend the appropriate level of PKI to more devices with limited compute power.”