Leveraging a hardware secure element, or ‘Root of Trust’, to establish end-to-end, chip-to-cloud security for IoT products and services is a key recommendation of the GSMA IoT Security Guidelines. This requires both the provisioning and use of security credentials that are inside a secure place within the device.

The SIM is best suited to function as the hardware Root of Trust in an IoT device as it has advanced security and cryptographic features and is a fully standardised secure element, enabling interoperability across different vendors and consistent use by IoT device makers.

IoT SAFE – Robust and Effective IoT Security at Scale

Developed by the mobile industry, IoT SAFE (IoT SIM Applet For Secure End-2-End Communication) enables IoT device manufacturers and IoT service providers to leverage the SIM as a robust, scalable and standardised hardware Root of Trust to protect IoT data communications.

IoT SAFE provides a common mechanism to secure IoT data communications using a highly trusted SIM, rather than using proprietary and potentially less trusted hardware secure elements implemented elsewhere within the device.

IoT SAFE:

Uses the SIM as a mini ‘crypto-safe’ inside the device to securely establish a (D)TLS session with a corresponding application cloud/server
Compatible with all SIM form factor: SIM, eSIM, iSIM..
Provides a common API for the highly secure SIM to be used as a hardware ‘Root of Trust’ by IoT devices
Helps solve challenge of provisioning millions of IoT devices

IoT SAFE provides security services that enable:

IoT devices to securely perform mutual (D)TLS authentication to a server using either asymmetric or symmetric security schemes
IoT devices to compute shared secrets and keep long-term keys secret
Provisioning and credential lifecycle management from a remote IoT security service

IoT SAFE Specifications:

Download IoT SAFE Documentation

Executive Summary

IoT SAFE enables IoT device manufacturers and IoT service providers to leverage the SIM as a robust, scalable and standardised hardware Root of Trust to protect IoT data communications.

Whitepaper

In this whitepaper, we review how a SIM, or any other Secure Element, can be leveraged as a root-of-trust to secure IoT device-to-cloud communications.

Implementation Guide

This implementation guide defines a common way for IoT applications to use the capabilities of the SIM to enhance the security of several commonly used internet protocols.