Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, June 8, 2021 edition of the Sansanet Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and then I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Amazon Sidewalk, of course, is going live this week, and a lot has been written about it, so I figured I'll look a little bit into the technical details as to what Amazon Sidewalk actually does.

I wrote up a diary about this for Monday, and just some of the highlights here.

It's a little bit too much to cover it all in the podcast.

The goal of Amazon Sidewalk is to allow devices, essentially

IoT devices, to send small messages to Amazon. The maximum available bandwidth is limited to 80

kilobits per second, and you can only send these messages in a very specific format to Amazon's sidewalk servers.

To connect a device to this network, it has to have a valid certificate that's signed with a manufacturer

certificate that is approved by Amazon. Initially, only Amazon will have devices that

are compatible, but they already announced that other manufacturers, like for example,

tile, will also offer devices. The key feature here is really the gateway. The gateway will

receive wireless messages from these devices.

A Gateway currently is either a later version of an Amazon Echo or some Amazon ring cameras

that are also acting as a gateway. The messages will typically arrive using a variety of different wireless technologies, like, for

example, Bluetooth low energy. There's also 900 megahertz sort of rotating key technology that's

being used. So it's not really extending your Wi-Fi network. Wi-Fi is actually not on the

roadmap there. It's more these low bandwidth, low power technologies

that are used to send these small status updates to the gateway. The gateway will then forward

them to Amazon. Everything is encrypted on the device itself and then again on the gateway.

Only Amazon should be able to decrypt these messages.

And yes, each device should have a unique key pair that's then being used to register

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