Ubirch Trust Protocol

The Ubirch Trust Protocol (UTP) is an integral part of the data communication between ubirch-enabled devices, services and the ubirch cloud services. It is a data format definition with the minimal required information to secure the integrity and authenticity of the data as well as providing information about the packet order to detect duplication and omission of packets in a data stream.

The protocol effectively consists of an envelope for the data transmission. This envelope “seals” and secures the payload it contains. The envelope is a conceptional one, though. In the actually data being exchanged between the sender and receiver, payload and envelope do not have to be transmitted together or in the same channel. In many applications it might be desirable (and is supported), to transmit the payload and the envelope/seal separately. This is accomplished by using a cryptographic hash function to create a digest of the original data packet and only transmitting the digest as the payload within the ubirch protocol envelope.

Separating data and cryptographic seal enables customers to integrate the ubirch trust infrastructure without touching the original data pipelines.

How it Works in a Nutshell

Short overview of the protocol. Check the details for more.

The UTP

The Ubirch Trust Protocol (UTP) consists of many chained Ubirch Protocol Packages (UPP).

The UPP

A Ubirch Protocol Package (UPP) consist of two mayor blocks, the UPP-DATA and the SIGNATURE of the UPP-DATA.

• UPP-DATA:
  • VERSION: Version of the protocol used
  • UUID: Device ID
  • PREV-SIG: The signature of the previous UPP, to chain the packages
  • TYPE: The type of DATA
  • HASH(DATA): Hash value of the customer data / payload itself
• SIGNATURE:
  • SIG(UPP-DATA): Signature of the UPP-DATA (ed25519 implementations will additionally hash the UPP-DATA before signing)

UPP Chaining

As already mentioned, UPP chaining is achieved by adding the signature of the previous message to the current one.

UTP Implementations

Implementations of the UTP can be found in the Ubirch Nano Client, which is available in different languages, like C or Python.

UTP Details

The C/C++ implementation contains a detailed technical description regarding the definition and structure of the protocol.

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