InterlinQ is nquiringmind’s secure middleware for IoT devices. It can be thought of as a virtual Operating System that has been designed to speed up the development of Internet of Things solutions. If you are developing new hardware, using InterlinQ allows you to develop your solution faster, provides very high security assurances, simplifies integration of new radios and sensors, and provides a whole suite of device management and edge processing functions.

IoT Optimised Crypto

Providing secure encrypted communications for IoT devices, is hard. Most IoT devices have very small memory footprints and low power CPUs. Additionally most IoT protocols do not support IP connectivity, meaning many of the normal Internet based encryption mechanisms will not work InterlInQ provides a highly optimised, strong encryption stack that is designed to run on low power devices. This technology has been successfully tested by industrial and military customers.

Universal Addressing

One of the biggest challenges for IOT deployments is actually addressing the end sensor device. These end sensor devices can be connected via USB, GPIO, SPI, I2C, RS232, 4-20 mA industrial control, LoRA, 802.15.4 BLE and whole host of other physical and wireless connectivity protocols. The InterlinQ solution, maps all of these different protocols to an internet friendly addressing scheme. Every device then has a unique address which can be used either remotely or locally.

Edge Processing

The ability to process and analyse data close to the sensor itself is at the heart of the “fog” computing concept. InterlinQ goes one step further by allowing data processing capability to be dynamically moved between IoT-Hub and cloud. This facility has profound impacts on resilience, autonomy and processing capability and flexibility. More importantly, it is a method of implementing proper IoT privacy: only data desired and explicitly permissioned leaves the devices. All other data is securely stored on the device (or thrown away)

Trusted Hardware

For IoT deployments requiring the ultimate security assurances, the software layer needs to be underpinned by hardware level security. You cannot expect a software image on an IoT device to attest to its own integrity. For these scenarios InerlinnQ supports full integration with TPMs (Trusted Platform Modules) and other hardware based integrity checking, secure boot and secure storage technologies.