Validation

Before a Device Firmware Update is carried out, the new image should be validated. Some information (for example, the compatibility) can be checked before the actual firmware is transferred (prevalidation). Other information, for example the hash of the image, should be validated after the transfer (postvalidation).

The provided firmware package must include the firmware image and an init packet that can be used to prevalidate the image. The format of the init packet and the actual validation process is defined by the DFU bootloader implementation. See Init packet for documentation about the validation that is used in the BLE Secure DFU Bootloader example.

To be compatible, the validation (which is part of the DFU bootloader implementation) and the image creation (usually done with an external tool) must use the same init packet format. A convenient way of ensuring the common format is to define the required contents of the init packet in a protocol buffer file. In this way, the packet format can be defined once and then be used in different places. See the BLE Secure DFU Bootloader example for an example implementation.

Nordic provides the command line tool nrfutil to create firmware packages with an init packet in a format defined by a protocol buffer file. See Creating a firmware package for information about how to use nrfutil to create a firmware package that is compatible with the BLE Secure DFU Bootloader example. If you change the format of the init packet in your DFU bootloader implementation, see the nrfutil documentation for instructions on how to update the tool. Alternatively, you can create your own tool to create the firmware package.