December 20, 2007

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What are the paranoia segments of the market?

There are low, medium, and high paranoia segments of the marketplace. Paranoia refereeing to concerns related to security. These issues deal with reliability and trustworthiness of embedded systems.

If you think about what that means, the high paranoia segment of the market would be characterized by what is sometimes referred to safty critical applications – for example where failure is not an option because people’s lives are at stake. Good examples of this would certainly be aerospace – the blue screen of death in the cockpit of a 747 is just not an option. A heart pacemaker which is every bit as much of an embedded system, having a software failure is not an option

The medium paranoia market would characterized, more typically, by the wireless subscriber segment (mobile or wireless communications market), where the safety critical nature of the device itself probably does not rise to the same standard that you would see in the high paranoia segment of the market. But, the sorts of problems that those customers are dealing with are starting to look increasingly similar.

The example here would be a blue tooth hacker that infects millions of phones with viruses that turns each of those devices into what is called a jammer. These devices are able to ring up a service provider extort millions of dollars under the threat of launching a denial of Service (DOS) attack. The implication besides the obvious inconvenience is that 911 systems will fail to work properly. Someone has an emergency and there are on mobile phone and they can’t dial – or they can dial and the network is down. This situation has catastrophic consequences that get worse.  We have never really experienced a region-wide failure of the wireless communications network.

So there are trends in the medium paranoia segments of the market that are increasingly important for all kinds of products that need virtualization technology.

With OKL4, a virtualized environment is created where operating systems are partitioned so that if there is a problem in one part of the systems it is unable to take down the other part of the system. It essentially creates and software firewall that prevents a virus on one part of the devices from infecting or taking control of the other part of the device.

Posted by Steve Subar on December 20 at 10:52 PM

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