There is a decades old principle in managing any project called the “Triple Constraint” or sometimes “The Iron Triangle.”
It states that any project involves trade-offs between three constraints:
Knowledge is power.
And knowledge of vulnerabilities affecting your products gives you the power to make them more secure.
That’s why our new Vigiles vulnerability monitoring and management service incorporates the industry’s first Targeted Vulnerability & Mitigation Tracker that pinpoints vulnerabilities affecting your specific products.
Every week, more than 300 new vulnerabilities affecting software systems are disclosed by security reporting services such as the Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE) database operated by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
These vulnerabilities run the gamut of low risk security concerns to critical issues. Some vulnerabilities can allow an attacker to take control of a company’s IT systems, gain access to sensitive information, even modify or otherwise compromise critical company operational processes and data.
Constant vigilance is the key to bringing truly secure products to market.
Constant vigilance is what you get with our new real-time security monitoring and management service, Timesys Vigiles.
We named the new service after the famed city watchmen of ancient Rome. Like them, Vigiles is constantly watching, scanning for threats, and pinpointing the security risks that need to be managed.
Poor security of Internet of Things has led the US Federal Government to (again) consider legislation to force makers of IoT devices to improve security.
And the proposed bill comes on the heels of industry concern that IoT attacks against the US power grid are increasingly common and threaten public safety.
This week a bipartisan group of four US senators introduced the “Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2019.” An earlier version of an IoT security bill, introduced in 2017, went basically nowhere.
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.
Effective product security starts with good product management.
And a good product manager recognizes that product security does not stop with secure design.
Effective security demands monitoring, tracking and acting on vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis throughout the product lifecycle.
A dedicated product management approach to vulnerability management is really the only way to ensure that your end customers are not exposed to breach risk over time.
The world of embedded systems has gone through a massive transformation in recent years.
The rise of smart devices, the Internet of Things, mobile computing platforms, connected devices and a range of other innovations have driven embedded system deployments through the roof. Industry observers estimate IoT deployments alone account for 23 billion device deployments in 2018, up from 15 million in 2015. And that number is projected to triple in the next six years.
The explosion in demand has had a major impact on the makers of embedded systems and the products containing them.
The deployment modes and functionality of embedded systems have evolved rapidly in recent years, thanks to widespread connectivity of Internet of Things devices and associated systems.
Yet the common security practices for most embedded systems remain largely unchanged from the days when they were isolated, air-gapped systems.
The shortfall in embedded system security is leading to sharply escalating risk of cyberbreaches. The trend is leading industry experts to advise embedded system developers to make security a top priority in design practices and product development.
Some product management decisions are hard. Product managers are constantly weighing trade-offs among time-to-market, functionality, competitive differentiation, development costs and other factors.
But some product decisions seem like no-brainers. Would you bring an IT product to market that puts customers at significantly increased risk of security breaches, privacy violations, potentially massive fines, and lawsuits?
“Of course not. That would be lunacy,” you can imagine the typical product manager as saying. Yet companies are shipping products every day that introduce this sort of risk into customer environments.
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Keep your IoT device secure throughout its lifecycle
