Device Certificate Rotation

The Device Certificate Rotation reference manual describes core concepts and functions of certificate rotation. This page explains how to configure your Factory for this functionality.

Choosing an EST Server

Before you can perform certificate rotations, you must ensure you have taken control of your Factory’s PKI. Specifically, you’ll need access to your factory_ca.key in order to complete these steps. There are two ways to then run an EST server.

FoundriesFactory Managed

Running fioctl keys est authorize will allow FoundriesFactory to run an EST server for you at <repoid>.est.foundries.io. This command will sign a CSR created in the backend with your Factory’s root key. The resulting TLS certificate will be used by the FoundriesFactory EST server.

Note

This option requires the FoundriesFactory® backend to have a certificate authority to sign renewal requests. This “online-ca” is configured when running fioctl keys ca create.

User Managed

Users may also run their own EST server. The EST server used by the Foundries.io™ backend is available at:

The GitHub project includes the details for getting this server up and running.

Performing a Certificate Rotation

Certificate rotations are triggered via configuration changes. Fioctl™ includes a helper for doing this either per device or per device group with:

  • fioctl device config rotate-certs <device>
  • fioctl config rotate-certs --group <group>

In both cases Fioctl defines a file and change handler such as:

fio-rotate-certs - [/usr/share/fioconfig/handlers/renew-client-cert]
   | ESTSERVER=https://4a53f331-6f01-4694-8a97-af253d4d9b63.est.foundries.io:8443/.well-known/est
   | PKEYIDS=01,07
   | CERTIDS=03,09
   | ROTATIONID=certs-1669058841

Certificate rotation will be executed when fioconfig processes this new file. If you are using a Factory managed EST server, the command works out of the box. However, user managed EST servers will require running rotate-certs with the --server-name option to inform devices where the EST server is located.

Parameters

The renew-client-cert handler requires a few parameters:

  • ESTSERVER: The base URL to your EST resources.
  • ROTATIONID: This unique ID will be used as the correlation ID when the device sends update events to the device-gateway.
  • PKEYIDS: Devices configured to use HSMs need to know a list of slot IDs to choose from when generating the next private key. 2 IDs are required so it can swap back and forth.
  • CERTIDS: Devices configured to use HSMs need to know a list of slot IDs to choose from when storing the new client certificate. 2 IDs are required so it can swap back and forth.