We added support for AWS v4 inspired request signing to IO’s v2 REST API this week. This change should allow devices that don’t support TLS/SSL to communicate with Adafruit IO without sending their AIO Key in the clear. Because the requests are signed using a HMAC, users also will be able to ensure that their requests were not manipulated by things like man-in-the-middle attacks. This change will also reduce the risk of replay attacks by including a timestamp in the signature, so the request will only be valid within a 15 minute window.

We are considering requiring signed requests for any API v2 requests that don’t use a TLS/SSL connection. If you think this is a bad idea, please let us know in the forums. We will be updating the Adafruit IO client libraries this week to support the new request signatures.

Here are the stats for the past week:

* 27.4 million inserts of logged data in the last 7 days
* 9,744 users
* 7,537 online feeds (20,474 feeds total)
* ~50 inserts per second via MQTT
* ~5 inserts per second via REST API

Inserts per second seem to be holding steady, despite the increase in online feeds. We are going to add another queue worker and monitor the inserts per second to see if that fixes the bottleneck.