Identity management across the device lifecycle

In IIoT identity management, the two important challenges are:

1. How to ensure digital uniqueness of devices
2. How to maintain digital uniqueness at the scale of millions (or forecasted billions) of deployed devices

In IT domains, the most common way to get an identity is to assign a unique username to an account, usually associated with a human user. Even in BYOD, the identity of mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, is tied to the owner's account, and they must be an authorized user of the corporate resources. The scale here is about two or three mobile devices per user. In a highly scaled IIoT use case involving millions of devices, to provision individual usernames would be anything but practical. Besides, IIoT devices typically don't have "users".

This requires the use of other forms of unique device identifiers. In addition to uniqueness, the more intrinsically the identifier correlates to the device, the better the scalability and...