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Understand key terms and concepts used in the LAAVAT Platform

Definitions Acronyms and Abbreviations

Term/Acronym Description
AAD Azure Active Directory
AHAB Advanced High Assurance Boot
AES Advanced Encryption Standard
Ansible Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code.
Ansible Vault Ansible encrypted storage.
API Application Programming Interface
Approval rule Per-operation rule naming which identity-provider groups may submit a request and which may approve it. A blanket group is auto-approved, which is how unattended CI signs.
Artifactory JFrog Enterprise Universal Repository Manager
AWS Amazon Web Services
Blanket group A group named in an approval rule whose submissions are approved automatically, without a second person. Used for CI pipelines; it bypasses two-person review, so scope it narrowly.
Bootgen AMD/Xilinx tool and image format for Zynq and Zynq UltraScale+ boot images.
CA Certificate Authority
CI/CD Combined practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.
CP Certificate Policy is a named set of rules that indicates the applicability of a certificate to a particular community and class of application with common security requirements. For example, a particular CP might indicate the applicability of a type of certificate to the authentication of parties engaging in business-to-business transactions for the trading of goods or services within a given price range. rfc3647
CPS Certificate Practice Statement is a statement of the practices that a certification authority employs in issuing, managing, revoking, and renewing or re-keying certificates. rfc3647
CRA EU Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/2847), which sets mandatory cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements.
CRL Certificate Revocation List — the published list of certificates revoked before their expiry.
CSF Command Sequence File (Used in HAB)
CSR Certificate Signing Request — a request containing a public key and subject details, submitted to a CA to be signed into a certificate.
CST NXP Code Signing Tool. Command-line tool used to sign HAB (i.MX6/7/8M) and, legacy, AHAB images.
Docker Docker is a tool designed to make it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and deploy it as one package.
EC Elliptic Curve
ECDSA Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
EFK Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana for logging.
Escrow A controlled key-recovery path. Superseded on the platform by the export paths described in key custody and export.
EST Enrollment over Secure Transport (RFC 7030), the protocol used for automated device certificate enrollment.
Extractable A platform flag on an encryption key token allowing that key to be wrapped out of the platform online. Valid only on encryption keys — the platform rejects it on signing keys.
FIT Flattened Image Tree — the U-Boot multi-component image format, which supports signatures over its constituent images.
Fluentd An open-source data collector for unified logging layer.
Fusemap The set of values to be burned into a device's one-time-programmable fuses, such as an SRK hash or an AES key.
Golang Golang is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google.
HA High Availability.
HAB High Assurance Boot
HKDF HMAC Key Derivation function
HMAC Keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC) is a specific type of message authentication code involving a cryptographic hash function and a secret cryptographic key.
HSM A Hardware Security Module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages digital keys for strong authentication and provides crypto processing.
HW Hardware
IDevID Initial Device Identifier — a long-lived device identity certificate installed during manufacturing (IEEE 802.1AR). See Trusted device identities.
IMG Image signing certificate in HAB
IoT The Internet of things (IoT) is the extension of Internet connectivity into physical devices and everyday objects.
IP Intellectual Property
ISG Installation and Setup Guide
IV Initialization Vector
Jenkins Open source automation server www.jenkins.io
JWE JSON Web Encryption rfc7516
KEK Key Encryption Key
Kubernetes(K8s) Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
K8s cluster Set of virtual machines implementing the K8 system.
LDevID Local Device Identifier — an operationally issued device identity certificate, typically enrolled in the field against an IDevID (IEEE 802.1AR). See Trusted device identities.
MCUboot MCUboot — a secure bootloader for 32-bit microcontrollers.
MS Graph Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365.
Nginx Nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server.
OCI The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a Linux Foundation project, started in June 2015 by Docker, to design open standards for operating-system-level virtualization (software containers), most importantly Linux containers.
PKI Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store & revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption.
Product The central configuration object in the platform: the keys, PKI and operations belonging to one device, product family or use case.
Product operation A callable action on a product — for example a signing or encryption operation — with its own key token and approval rule.
Prometheus Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit.
R&D Research and Development
RAUC Robust Auto-Update Controller — an update framework for embedded Linux, using signed update bundles.
REST Representational State Transfer (REST)
RSA RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is one of the first public-key cryptosystems.
RSA-PSS RSA signature scheme with PSS padding. Required for RSA AHAB SRK certificates signed via SPSDK.
SBOM Software Bill of Materials — an inventory of the components in a product, required for CRA vulnerability handling.
SBSFU Secure Boot and Secure Firmware Update — STMicroelectronics' secure boot framework.
SGK Subordinate key of the SRK key and is used to verify signatures across product software.
signing-tool The reference client — a Python CLI published on PyPI that drives every platform operation from a desktop or CI/CD.
SPSDK NXP Secure Provisioning SDK. Tool used by the platform to sign AHAB boot containers (the SignSPSDK operation).
SRK Super Root Key. A key pair (RSA or elliptic-curve) that forms the start of the boot-time authentication chain.
SRK Hash Hash value of the SRK table.
Sub-CA Subordinate Certificate Authority
SW Software
TLS Transport Layer Security
Truststore A CA trust list uploaded to the platform, used to validate mTLS, EST or provisioning client certificates.
UML Unified Modeling Language
X.509 X.509 is a standard defining the format of public key certificates. rfc5280
YAML (a recursive acronym for "YAML Ain't Markup Language") is a human-readable data-serialization language.
# Commands prefixed with this are run as root
$ Commands prefixed with this are run as user