How fast time flies! I’m closing in on week 6 of my internship, and my experience so far has been such a ride. In this blog, I’ll write about my project - “Extend Zezere, the Fedora IoT onboarding web app, to support the FIDO device onboarding spec and imp.”

Fedora is an extraordinarily diverse and big project that ships Workstations, Servers, Cloud, IoT (Internet of Things) operating systems, and many more amazing things. Fedora IoT is a Fedora distribution (an operating system image) that provides a platform to build your IoT projects and is also a perfect fit for home servers, industrial PCs and edge computing.

Zezere is a feature which is exclusively available for Fedora IoT. It is a basic web app that allows onboarding machines into a network. Device onboarding is the process of installing secrets and configuration data into a device so that the device can connect and interact securely with an IoT platform. The device owner uses the IoT platform to manage the device.

Zezere was written a number of years ago, and since then, the landscape of onboarding IoT devices has changed. A new FIDO FDO (FIDO Device Onboarding) standard has been introduced, which provides an automatic zero-touch onboarding protocol for IoT devices. The Red Hat Edge/IoT has an implementation of the FDO spec written in Rust with an API. The how’s of this implementation are out of this project’s scope. My work revolves around developing Zezere to integrate this API and replace the proprietary implementation that Zezere currently uses. Apart from that, I’ll be working on a lot of other improvements and fixes to Zezere’s UI/UX and the overall experience for onboarding devices.

Whelp, that’s a lot for today. Until next time!

References:

  1. https://fidoalliance.org/specifications/
  2. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/iot/
  3. https://blog.while-true-do.io/spotlight-fedora-iot/