IoT devices lack the resources for secure connections
It is not too difficult to run a webserver on an IoT (edge) device, even when the latter has few resources; any 8-bit microcontroller with a little bit of memory can do it. A client can then connect to the device and read or write data. However, letting an IoT device read data from or write to a server is much harder. The reason for this is that today most servers require secure connections. Small 8-bit MCUs just do not have the resources to make secure connections with certificates and encryption and the whole shabang. Offloading some tasks to a “helper” computer can be a solution in such situations.
Webpages can contain huge amounts of data
Another problem is that webpages can contain so much data that even if a small MCU system manages to establish a secure connection, it may simply not be able to handle all the data. Again, offloading some tasks to a helper computer can provide a solution.
Use a proxy to offload the IoT device
To illustrate the concept this project will use a helper computer to connect to a secure webserver, parse the data, extract the information the IoT edge device is interested in, and send it to it. Such a helper computer is generally known as a proxy server. The only difference with a proxy server is that in this project the proxy is a client of the IoT edge device instead of the inverse. We could call it a proxy client instead.
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