Security

I have just attended The Open Group meeting in Munich. The Open Group look after standards such as POSIX and as such Wind River are a member of the Real Time and Embedded Systems Forum.

This week as part of the Real Time Group we were looking at "Dependability through Assuredness" and had some great presentations on formal methods and security. We (or rather my boss Rob Hoffman) presented on the MILS architecture. If you want to see a demo of this technology then visit MILCOM 2008

Security (as with safety) is something that has to be designed into the system architecture. It is fascinating to listen to the experts discussing potential threats and covert channels into systems and how you can start to formally prove your system is secure.

This was further strengthened by the report on the BBC on keyboard sniffers. The technique allows the "hacker" to listen in on what the keyboard is sending into the computer from a distance of up to 20m and the report concludes "The results led the researchers to declare keyboards were "not safe to transmit sensitive information". "

This just goes to show how much thought you have to put into potential security threats, how often have you sat in a cafe and typed away on your laptop without a care in the world.....

Comments

[Rich Dubielzig]

Well, obviously the thing to do is make sure that whatever you type is already a strongly encrypted code. Really, is it that hard to do DES in your head?

More practically, did anyone mention a way that was safe to enter data? Touchscreens? Speech-to-text? Brain sensors?