Today’s platform update adds several new workflow nodes for handling cryptographically signed data, and for implementing certificate-based authentication.
First, we’ve added the Crypto: Sign Node for cryptographically signing data strings with a private key – and that key can be pulled from a new Certificate / Key Pair service credential for cloud-based usages.
As a companion to that, we’ve also added a Crypto: Verify Node that can verify a signature applied to data using a public key, a certificate, or – for cloud-based uses – the original private key used to sign the data as pulled from the service credential.
Together, these workflow nodes bring a new security dimension to Losant’s workflow engine that can be applied when creating signed URLs or authenticating requests to and/or from Losant’s Gateway Edge Agent.
Additionally, we’ve added features to assist with certificate-based authentication, a feature that Losant has long supported but has been rarely utilized to date.
The Certificate: Create Node takes a certificate signing request (CSR) and a certificate / key pair – stored in the new service credential for cloud-based uses – and returns a signed certificate. This certificate can then be used to authenticate requests to various services.
The Certificate: Read Node takes an existing certificate and returns its public key and metadata. This can be useful when receiving requests that include the certificate in the request body and parsing the value.
By registering created certificates and certificate authorities in the Losant API, you can use these new features in support of device authentication against Losant’s MQTT broker.
As always, this release comes with other features and improvements, including:
With every new release, we listen to your feedback. By combining your suggestions with our roadmap, we can continue to improve the platform while maintaining its ease of use. Let us know what you think in the Losant Forums.