Onyx Beacon, a provider of Apple’s iBeacon compatible technology has rolled out a business centric offering that can be deployed at scale, thus requiring better management and security features.
Onyx Beacon claims to have received great feedback from mobile developers about their initial beacon offering which has led to the next step that caters to a broad spectrum of industries; from retail to banking, from event management to home automation.
A beacon broadcasts its identifiers, so that the mobile apps will know what message to deliver once the smartphone is in the vicinity of a beacon. However, when an enterprise is looking at multitudes of deployments, security is of utmost importance.
With the lack of a proper security measure, “anybody with a mobile app” can alter UUID, Major and Minor configurations in the beacons, “effectively hijacking them (the beacons) for their own purposes.”
The encryption in the device uses a combination of AES-128 and MAC (Message Authentication Code), relying on an embedded dedicated hardware coprocessor. A Beacon Management Software carries out the configuration process. This provides a secure way to configure and manage large-scale deployments, avoiding beacon loss to UUID hijacking.
“With the offering of our Beacon Management Software as an API, we provide a unique solution to mobile developers, digital agencies, retailers and other businesses who want to integrate this new technology in their current mobile apps,” explains Onyx Beacon CoFounder, Bogdan Oros.
“Improving security was just the next logical step in our efforts to transform the novelty beacons into commodity devices easy to adopt and deploy,” he added.
(Image credit: Onyx Beacon)
