Introducing The New my-devices.net: Secure Cloud-Based Remote Access for The Internet of Things

We have just released a new and much improved version of my-devices.net, along with a completely new website. my-devices.net is cloud-ready service providing secure remote access to embedded devices and intelligent systems via HTTP(S) or other TCP-based protocols. With my-devices.net, any network-connected device running the my-devices.net connector software can be securely accessed remotely over the internet from browsers, mobile apps, desktop, server or cloud applications using HTTP(S) or TCP-based protocols. This even works if the device is behind a NAT router, firewall or proxy server. The device becomes just another host on the internet, addressable via its own URL and protected by the my-devices.net server against unauthorized or malicious access.

Here’s a list of all that’s new:

• We now provide free user accounts, with up to five connected devices per account. Registration can be done directly on the website, is fully automatic and is done in one minute. In fact, in most cases it takes less than five minutes to have your first device connected to my-devices.net. All necessary software is available from the my-devices.net website as well.
• We use a new protocol for connecting devices to the reflector server. Previously, we’ve used the Reverse HTTP protocol. However, this had various restrictions, the most significant one that it was not possible to have multiple HTTP requests in parallel to a device. This also ruled out new technologies like WebSockets. Fortunately, this is no longer the case. We now use a custom tunneling protocol based on WebSockets over SSL/TLS (we call it WebTunnel), that allows us to securely tunnel arbitrary TCP traffic to and from the device. So in addition to accessing your device’s web server remotely, you can now also access your device’s shell via SSH, or even use custom TCP-based protocols.
• The web-based user interface of the reflector server has been much improved and modernized. We use WebSockets for live status updates of connected devices.
• The REST API now supports CORS. This makes it super easy to integrate my-devices.net in a custom web application. The API documentation now also includes jQuery samples.
• There have been numerous other improvements under the hood, way too many to mention here.

Of course all of my-devices.net, including the server, is based on the POCO C++ Libraries. The reflector server heavily uses the Open Service Platform, including the user authentication features, the web server, the new mail bundle, the shell, etc. All dynamic pages have been built with the POCO PageCompiler, so it’s all native code. Not the most obvious choice for a web application, but the only viable choice for us. Give it a try at www.my-devices.net.