Security is becoming a critical differentiator in embedded system products across a wide range of applications.
And the tools are now available to ensure products can be more secure without sacrificing time-to-market and, in some cases, even accelerating development.
Those are key takeaways from this year’s Embedded World Exhibition and Conference that took place in Germany last week.
Vulnerability Scanning & Patch Notification
The flood of security vulnerabilities hitting the IT industry is now at a critical level, and it is imperative that product developers focus on monitoring and mitigating the impact of them.
“They are coming at the rate of 350 vulnerabilities a week,” said our CEO Atul Bansal in a video interview.
Atul highlighted our embedded Linux development and security tools at the STMicroelectronics exhibit, part of our participation in STMicroelectronics’ launch of its STM32MP1 Microprocessor Series.
Figure 1: Timesys Vulnerability Scanner and Patch Notifier demo at Embedded World 2019
“We have built a vulnerability scanner that scans the embedded Linux,” Atul explained, “and it can actually find the vulnerabilities specific to your application, your embedded Linux.”
Atul and the Timesys team demonstrated our solutions for scanning Linux software components and also monitoring and notifying developers of patches applicable to their systems. Timesys’ CVE scanner and patch notifier are part of our Device Security Solutions.
The Security Vulnerability scanner utilizes a Timesys-built CVE manager that monitors security databases and mailing lists. It serves as a notifier by scanning your build configuration and highlighting CVEs and other security disclosures that apply to it.
Our Security Patch Notification alerts you to fixed versions of packages as well as minimum version and upstream fixes for kernel CVEs.
Streamlining Testing & Development Cycles
Another Timesys innovation on display was our On-Premises Board Farm Cloud (BFC) and Test Automation solutions.
“This is helpful for remote debugging, helpful for doing the test automation,” Atul told the interviewers, demonstrating remote access via the cloud to an STM32MP157A-EV1 evaluation board for testing.
Access to boards is always a potential bottleneck for development cycles and can delay bringing new products to market. Such issues can be avoided by remotely accessing BSPs for key development and test activities, which is the benefit of the Timesys On-Premises BFC.
Figure 2: Timesys On-Premises Board Farm Cloud demo with STM32MP1 Series MCU at Embedded World 2019
In addition to remote access to boards to eliminate hardware bottlenecks, our service accelerates cycles via test automation and continuous integration, compressing schedules by automating key test tasks to reduce time-consuming manual testing activities.
Secure Boot, Chain of Trust and Data Protection
Another Embedded World highlight was the presentation of a range of Secure by Design best practices by our Technical Director of Security Akshay Bhat.
In a presentation on “Secure Boot, Chain of Trust and Data Protection,” Akshay outlined approaches to extend a software authentication scheme from bootloader to user space, effectively securing a product from running unauthorized, malicious code.
“In order to secure the product, the software authentication scheme must be extended all the way to user space, establishing a chain of trust,” Akshay said in his conference paper on the topic, available for download here.
More Information
Contact us today to learn more about secure boot, chain of trust, our Board Farm Cloud and our vulnerability management and patch notifier offerings that streamline your development cycles while enabling you to bring more secure products to market.
We provided development and security tools to companies in IoT security, open source software security, embedded system security, embedded Linux security, and secure system development with Yocto.
About Timesys
Timesys has extensive experience with embedded system development and lifecycle management. Timesys has been instrumental in working with global leader semiconductor manufacturers with smart, quick and quality solutions for highly complex systems with accelerated product innovation and multiple product variants.
