Originally published at: Golioth Announces Connection ID Support - Golioth
At Golioth, we pride ourselves on doing both the deep technical work—as well as the routine maintenance—required to ensure we back up our claim of being the most efficient way that devices in the field can securely talk to services in the cloud. In service of this mission, last week we turned on DTLS 1.2 Connection ID support in Golioth Cloud. While most users will not see any visible differences in how their devices connect to Golioth, behind the scenes many devices are now enabled to perform more efficiently. This is especially true for those connecting via cellular networks. Devices using Connection ID can see a meaningful impact on bandwidth costs, power usage, and battery life. This not only benefits users of Golioth, but also means that more devices are able to operate for longer, reducing waste and energy use. Because we believe deeply in this potential widespread impact, we have been and will continue to do all work in this area in the open. What are Connection IDs? We have written previously about how we use CoAP over DTLS / UDP to establish secure connections between Golioth and devices. Because UDP is a connection-less protocol, attributes of each datagram that arrive at a local endpoint must be used to identify the remote endpoint on the other side. In short, DTLS uses the IP address and port of the remote endpoint to identify connections. This is a reasonable mechanism, but some devices change IP address and port frequently, resulting in the need to constantly perform handshakes. In some scenarios, a full handshake may be required just to send a single packet. Performing these handshakes can have a negative impact on…