Azure Sphere

Great news came last month, Microsoft launches it's first non-NT based OS, it is an Linux based OS for MCUs (microcontrollers), the great thing here, they claim to have a solution for the security problem on IoT, they claim to have the most secure OS for MCUs, we all remember that dark day when the "full" internet was down, because a botnet took down one of the main DNS service providers in the USA, it was a hard punch to the IoT movement but also was an oportunity to really make a deep dive into the security issues of IoT.

What they claim
Microsoft published a great post providing a great overview on the product, but lets just review it.

The certified MCUs are, as they state, secure from the silicon, that means that security is the first thougth when building one of this MCUs, but how efficient and cost-value effective are them? well, we don't know, the first one is about to lauch but no price has been said.

Azure Sphere OS: it is a OS that is built for security and agility, thats what they have said, but I haven't found any security test results on the web.

Azure Sphere Security Services: this are cloud services built to provide an upper layer of security to the MCUs and also a layer to push updates of the firmware and user software that will run on the MCU.

My concerns
Well, we know that they love to charge for everything, and also if the services are bound to Azure, then maybe that could be a barrier that is hard to tackle, because not everyone likes Azure, every one have their issues with any cloud provider.


My conclusions
I really like to see this kind of things, companies making new technology to tackle some big problems, and also Catie McCaffrey is envolved on the development of this platform, and the research papers are free and open to read, so I think they have some of the best minds into this, but still, they claim a lot and they haven't shown it running, expectations are high for them.