Hi, this is Cuno from Oberon microsystems

It's been a long time since our last blog post - more than four years!

We've not gone away, but have been super busy with the next phase of our HomeKit work, and gone into stealth mode for that. As for the reason, I keep it brief and just point to Apple ADK.

Now we are embarking on a new journey, having to do with edge security software and Rust on microcontrollers. If this is interesting to you, please let me know (pfister@oberon.ch). But we are just at the beginning, so thank you for your patience!

With best regards and greetings from Switzerland

Cuno

We've just moved to a larger and even more centrally located office, near the Zürich main station. The address is now Neugasse 10, the postal code remains 8005.

In part one of this blog post I have indicated why secure remote firmware updates are important, and how a firmware update mechanism may be threatened. Let us look at some ways for mitigating such threats.

When a machine, e.g. a printing machine, is connected to the Internet, this enables remote diagnostics and remote control. This in turn allows to react faster when a problem occurs, downtime can be reduced or even prevented completely thanks to predictive maintenance. A gateway is used to connect the machine to the Internet - and potentially misused by attackers to get access to the machine (visualized by the shark in the simple Internet of Things model shown below).