The serial vault serves an important function in the management of a dedicated IoT App Store
The Serial Vault is a Canonical-hosted multi-tenant web portal offered to customers. Customers may choose to set up their own dedicated Serial Vault service.
The main purpose of the Serial Vault is to provide a signed Serial Assertion to devices, which allows them to authenticate against a dedicated Snap Store. The Serial Vault also enables other functions, such as remodelling support.
The Serial Vault provides a user interface and an API to enable a device to receive digitally signed documents(assertions) that are used for authentication and authorization. An authenticated device can have access to restricted snaps from a dedicated Snap Store, providing a customised experience to the device owners.
The main assertions that are handled by the Serial Vault are:
- Account Assertion
- Account Key Assertion
- Serial-Request Assertion
- Model Assertion
- Serial Assertion
All of these are used by the device, Serial Vault and dedicated Snap Store to verify and manage the access of a device.
In this section, we will cover a basic overview of the Serial Vault and how it is used.