Warning: the Torizon Update System is a project currently under development at Toradex Labs. It is still an experimental project in it's early stages which is subject to changes without notice. This might impact new releases and/or iterations.
TorizonCore is built with OSTree and Aktualizr, the former is a shared library and suite of command line tools that combines a "git-like" model for committing and downloading bootable filesystem trees, along with a layer for deploying them and managing the bootloader configuration. The latter is a "daemon-like" open-source implementation of the Uptane SOTA standard that secures updates from end-to-end.
OSTree and Aktualizr are complementary and together they form the foundation for OTA (over-the-air) update capabilities on the device.
The device portion of the Torizon Update System reuses what Linux microPlatform and meta-updater are providing. You can find more about the OTA strategy on the foundries.io Blog.
On the server side, Toradex is working on a cloud-based hosted option as well as an on-premise option to provide a complete OTA solution which works with Torizon-Core. This is currently a work in progress, subscribe to developer website updates to keep track of the progress. Meanwhile, you can Update Your Device Using HERE OTA Connect for early testing.
This article complies to the Typographic Conventions for Torizon Documentation.
OSTree has its own article, please refer to OSTree for a brief overview and a demonstration of how to use it.
Uptane is a de facto automotive SOTA standard, held by a non-profit consortium named Uptane Alliance under the IEEE/ISTO Federation. Its focus is to enable secure software updates over-the-air resiliently. It relies on multiple servers to provide security by validating data before a download starts and ensuring that even an offline attack that compromises a single server would still not be enough to compromise the system security. Uptane is an enhancement to the TUF (The Update Framework) security framework, which is currently a very widly used framework to secure software and package updates on computers and smartphones. The motivations to expand the TUF framework are described in detail here and a favorable explanation of TUF is [here] (https://github.com/theupdateframework/notary/blob/master/docs/service_architecture.md).
Aktualizr is the client implementation of Uptane. It is written in C++ and its responsibility is to communicate with an Uptane compatible server. It verifies if new downloads are available, install those updates on the system and reports status to the server, while guaranteeing the integrity and confidentiality of OTA updates. Aktualizr handles Docker image updates seamlessly by using Docker Compose yml files.
