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ESP Secure Certificate Manager

The esp_secure_cert_mgr provides a simplified interface to access the PKI credentials of a device pre-provisioned with the Espressif Provisioning Service. It provides the set of APIs that are required to access the contents of the esp_secure_cert partition. A demo example has also been provided with the esp_secure_cert_mgr, more details can be found out in the example README

Usage Guidelines

1) Include esp_secure_cert_mgr in your project

There are two ways to include esp_secure_cert_mgr in your project:

i) Add esp_secure_cert_mgr to your project with help of IDF component manager:

ii) Add esp_secure_cert_mgr as an extra component in your project.

  • Download esp_secure_cert_mgr with:
    git clone https://github.com/espressif/esp_secure_cert_mgr.git
  • Include esp_secure_cert_mgr in ESP-IDF with setting EXTRA_COMPONENT_DIRS in CMakeLists.txt/Makefile of your project.For reference see Optional Project Variables

2) Use the public API provided by esp_secure_cert_mgr in your project

  • The file esp_secure_cert_read.h contains the public APIs provided by the esp_secure_cert_mgr. Please include the file in your project to make use of the available APIs. The file also contains more details about the available APIs.

What is Pre-Provisioning?

With the Espressif Pre-Provisioning Service, the ESP modules are pre-provisioned with an encrypted RSA private key and respective X509 public certificate before they are shipped out to you. The PKI credentials can then be registered with the cloud service to establish a secure TLS channel for communication. With the pre-provisioning taking place in the factory, it provides a hassle-free PKI infrastructure to the Makers. You may use this repository to set up your test modules to validate that your firmware works with the pre-provisioned modules that you ordered through Espressif's pre-provisioning service.

ESP Secure Cert Partition

When a device is pre-provisioned that means the PKI credentials are generated for the device. The PKI credentials are then stored in a partition named esp_secure_cert.

The esp_secure_cert partition can be generated on host with help of configure_esp_secure_cert.py utility, more details about the utility can be found in the tools/README.

For esp devices that support DS peripheral, the pre-provisioning is done by leveraging the security benefit of the DS peripheral. In that case, all of the data which is present in the esp_secure_cert partition is completely secure.

When the device is pre-provisioned with help of the DS peripheral then by default the partition primarily contains the following data:

  1. Device certificate: It is the public key/ certificate for the device's private key. It is used in TLS authentication.
  2. CA certificate: This is the certificate of the CA which is used to sign the device cert.
  3. Ciphertext: This is the encrypted private key of the device. The ciphertext is encrypted using the DS peripheral, thus it is completely safe to store on the flash.

As listed above, the data only contains the public certificates and the encrypted private key and hence it is completely secure in itself. There is no need to further encrypt this data with any additional security algorithm.

Partition Format

The esp_secure_cert partition uses TLV format by default. Please take a look at the format document for more details.