FROM
THE EDITOR
Close the blinds, lock the doors, turn on the monitoring cameras and speak very, very softly. This week, we begin a two part study of security issues in embedded system design. Is your system safe? Is there a justifiable reason to invest engineering resources and increase cost to make it any safer? Our latest feature helps you decide when and how to batten down the hatches.
Also this week, our Journal Jobs website is sporting new features, new jobs, and a host of new opportunities for employers and job seekers alike. If you haven’t visited www.journaljobs.com lately, stop by and see what’s cooking in the world of technology employment.
Thanks
for reading! If
there's anything we can do to make our publications
more useful to you, please let us know at: comments@embeddedtechjournal.com
Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Security Blanket
Protecting Your System in an Age of Paranoia
The year is 2010. Alone in the kitchen, 8 year-old Mikey pulls a cereal container down from the cupboard. He presses the "open"
button. A tiny camera with a wide-angle lens grabs an image. Inside the lid, a low-cost embedded system with hardware video
processing locates Mikey's key facial features in the image and creates an identification map. It then downloads from the
household wireless network a current database of the family members allowed access to that cereal at this time of day. Mikey is
on the "disallowed" list. The lock holds fast. A text notification is already on its way to both parents' mobile phones. Mikey is
busted!
Security is a growing concern in almost every type of system design today. Some applications have a more pressing need than
others, of course. The consequences of Mikey subverting the automated cereal protection system and downing a few unauthorized
grams of carbohydrates are far less severe than, say, a security failure in an airliner engine control system. Almost all systems
these days have at least rudimentary security concerns. In a few cases, security is paramount.
A somewhat undesirable corollary to Moore's Law might say that the more gates we have available, the more we'll tend to use. Why
connect a simple switch directly to a control line when we can add a microcontroller that allows us to use a button, de-bounce
the press action, check the status of the day/night condition, and illuminate the appropriate status LED? We sprinkle superfluous
software and hardware into our systems like Emeril adding the final "Bam!" of seasoning to some exotic culinary creation.
The consequence of this complexity explosion is a trend toward systems with a plethora of security vulnerabilities. Usually, we
don't care. But in the cases where we do, the difficulty of maintaining rigorous security grows almost exponentially as the
complexity of our basic system rises. Throw Moore's Law into the mix, and you end up with double security holes squared. Not a
pretty picture for the paranoid. [more]
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