Trusted root recovery
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorsCristian Iuliu Pop, Michiel van Schaik, Arturo Lotito, Mahesh Sham Rohera, Benjamin Livesley Thomas, David John Roth
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A device is provisioned to communicate with a cloud service provider when the device is unable to establish a secure connection due to an invalid root certificate authority (CA) certificate installed at the device. The cloud service provider establishes a temporary non-secure connection between a device recovery service and the device. The device recovery service sends a signed updated root CA certificate to the device. Based on the signed updated root CA certificate, a secure connection is established between the device and operational functions at the cloud service provider.
Claims17
A method of updating a device, the method comprising:
- receiving, by a cloud service provider, a request from a device to establish a secure connection;
- determining, by the cloud service provider, that the device is unable to establish the secure connection due to a previously valid root certificate authority (CA) certificate installed at the device that is outdated;
- instantiating, at the cloud service provider, an instance of a device recovery service at the cloud service provider;
- establishing a temporary non-secure connection between the device and the instance of the device recovery service, wherein the instance is partitioned from operational functions at the cloud service provider, wherein the temporary non-secure connection is limited to communications for updating the previously valid root CA certificate for the device;
- receiving, by the instance of the device recovery service from the device via the temporary non-secure connection, a current root CA certificate version;
- verifying, by the instance of the device recovery service, that the current root CA certificate version was a previously valid CA certificate that is outdated;
- sending, by the instance of the device recovery service to the device, a signed updated root CA certificate;
- and
- based on the signed updated root CA certificate, establishing, by the cloud service provider, a secure connection between the device and the operational functions at the cloud service provider.
A computing device comprising:
- a memory storing thereon instructions that when executed by a processing system of the computing device, cause the computing device to perform operations comprising:
- initiating a process to establish a secure connection with a cloud service provider;
- receiving, from the cloud service provider, an indication that the secure connection cannot be established due to a previously valid root certificate authority (CA) certificate installed at the computing device that is outdated;
- in response to determining that the secure connection cannot be established, allowing a temporary non-secure connection to be established with a device recovery service at the cloud service provider, wherein the temporary non-secure connection is limited to communications for updating the previously valid root CA certificate for the computing device;
- sending to the device recovery service, via the temporary non-secure connection, a current root CA certificate version installed at the computing device;
- receiving, from the device recovery service via the temporary non-secure connection, an updated root CA certificate in response to verifying, by the device recovery service, that the current root CA certificate version was a previously valid CA certificate that is outdated;
- verifying that the updated root CA certificate is a more recent version than the current root CA certificate;
- and
- in response to verifying that the updated root CA certificate is a more recent version than the current root CA certificate, establishing a secure connection with the cloud service provider based on the updated root CA certificate.
A method of updating firmware installed on a device configured to communicate with a cloud service provider over a communications network, the method comprising:
- receiving, by the cloud service provider, a request from the device to establish a secure connection;
- determining, by the cloud service provider, that the device is unable to establish the secure connection due to an error associated with the firmware installed on the device;
- establishing, by the cloud service provider, a temporary non-secure connection between the device and a device recovery service, wherein the temporary non-secure connection is limited to communications for updating the firmware on the device;
- receiving, by the device recovery service from the device via the temporary non-secure connection, a current version of the firmware installed on the device;
- verifying, by the device recovery service, the current version of the firmware installed on the device;
- sending, by the device recovery service to the device via the temporary non-secure connection, a signed data package that includes a download location for an updated version of the firmware installed on the device and a firmware hash to verify the signed data package;
- and
- based on communications generated by the device using the updated firmware version, establishing the secure connection between the device and the cloud service provider.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.