Sidewalk device lifecycle

The Sidewalk devices that you want to onboard to AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk can be in either of the following three stages:

Prototype devices
Prototype devices are primarily used for testing purposes and to explore the Amazon Sidewalk onboarding workflow. You can use the prototyping flow to create up to 1,000 Sidewalk prototype devices. You can provision one Sidewalk device at a time since the prototyping flow doesn’t support bulk-provisioning to onboard Sidewalk devices

Production devices
Production devices are devices that are manufactured in large quantities without any device limit using the mass production flow. These devices can be manufactured after Sidewalk qualification is obtained.

The following diagram shows the various stages in the lifecycle of your Sidewalk prototype, pre-production, or production devices.

Device created
Sidewalk devices can be created either using the prototyping flow or the mass production flow.

• In the prototyping flow, you manually flash the manufacturing page (a binary representation of the certificate data from AWS IoT console) onto the Sidewalk device for authentication.
• In the mass production flow, the contract manufacturer (CM) ingests the device data into Amazon’s device provisioning system either via EDI or SFTP, after which the devices are created. If the device data cannot be authenticated, the device entry will be rejected with a notification to the CM to correct the data.

Device associated with account
In this stage, associate your Sidewalk device in the required AWS account to let the device access other AWS IoT Core features.

Device registered
During device registration, a device presents device certificates to the Sidewalk cloud. If the device is successfully authenticated, then a secure channel is formed between the device and the Sidewalk cloud and then device and application server to establish mutual network and application session keys respectively. These session keys are used for device communication until it is de-registered.

A device can be registered using an Amazon Sidewalk gateway, or a mobile application that integrates the Sidewalk Mobile SDK.

Device de-registered
De-registration process, also triggered by the end customer, leads to removal of device and end customer association at the cloud partner end. Sidewalk continues to own the same mapping from creation between the device and cloud partner. De-registration also leads to removal of all the keys established as part of registration process in the cloud and device. De-registration and registration cycle can occur multiple times in the life-cycle of a device.

Device blocked
The validity of a device on the network is derived from authenticity of the chain of trust. Under unusual circumstances, Amazon Sidewalk can revoke certificates for a particular device or device type which would inhibit that device from communicating with the application server. The developer can also revoke established permission between their own device and cloud partner account.

---