The Virginia Innovation Partnership, Device Authority and Crossroads Innovation Group are working together to provide a blueprint for IoT security best practices in smart city applications.

Device Authority, a specialist in identity and access management (IAM) for the IoT, and Crossroads Innovation Group, a Virginia-based consulting firm dedicated to emerging technologies, have announced their inclusion in the critical project focused on IoT security standards.

Led by the Virginia Innovative Partnership with funding from the Virginia Smart Community Testbed and the US Department of Homeland Security, this project aims to evaluate best-practices and technology standards related to securing IoT infrastructure at the edge.

The Virginia Smart Community Testbed in Stafford County, Virginia, is home to developing smart technology for the commonwealth. It is the first smart-city testbed involving an IoT platform, fully integrated with 5G and other new and emerging technologies for smart cities around the country. The testbed aims to accelerate smart technology growth in the commonwealth while addressing the known and emerging challenges of securing critical infrastructure.

The testbed is a shared knowledge platform to develop practical and relevant smart technologies. As a living laboratory, it is a public-private partnership involving multiple industry partners who will focus on relevant and practical use cases to produce innovations using emerging and smart technologies, focused on ensuring that the economic and social benefits of digital transformation are realised fully.

Along with other industry, federal and state partners, Device Authority was selected to participate in the testbed, leveraging its Keyscaler platform to automate standards-based device onboarding and identity lifecycle management for new and legacy device deployments, helping protect IoT assets by preventing breaches at scale.

Crossroads Innovation Group has been promoting industry standards and is providing evaluation of best practices related to guidelines from Nist, IEEE and emerging standards such as Fido.

The combined approach, which includes multiple participants, will provide critical cyber-security proof points across the range of technologies involved in the deployment of diverse IoT technologies and use-cases. Importantly as it relates to the securing the digital environment, the testbed group will also develop architectural guidance and best-practice recommendations for the procurement and secure deployment of IoT technologies by federal, state, local and civilian agencies.

“Today’s cyber-security threat landscape requires a strong partnership between public and private sectors,” said David Ihrie, vice president at Virginia Innovation Partnership. “This project in the Stafford testbed gives us the opportunity to provide a best-in-class approach to securing the broad universe of IoT devices that is growing daily and that, without adherence to important standards like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, will continue to be a major threat to security.”

Device Authority’s KeyScaler platform provides trust for IoT devices and the IoT ecosystem to address the problems of securing the IoT. It uses dynamic device key generation and PKI Signature+ that delivers simplicity and trust to IoT devices. This delivers automated device provisioning, authentication, credential management, policy-based end-to-end data security and encryption, and secure updates.

With offices in California and the UK, Device Authority partners with IoT ecosystem providers including AWS, Ericsson, Entrust, HID Global, Microsoft, PTC, Thales, Venafi and Wipro.

Based in Virginia, Crossroads Innovation Group supports public-private partnerships pursing emerging technology deployment and adaptive workforce professionalisation.

The non-profit Virginia Innovation Partnership is the commercialisation and seed stage economic development driver in the commonwealth that leads funding, infrastructure and policy initiatives to support Virginia’s innovators, entrepreneurs, start-ups and market development strategies.