Everywhere you look these days, it is readily apparent that embedded systems of all types are under attack by hackers. In just one example from the last few weeks, researchers at Kaspersky Lab (a Moscow-headquartered maker of anti-virus and other software security products) published a report documenting a specific pernicious and malicious attack against “virtually all hard drive firmware”. […]
Tag: embedded
First Impressions of Google Glass 2.0
Last week I took advantage of Google’s special 1-day-only buying opportunity to purchase an “Explorer” edition of Google Glass 2.0. My package arrived over the weekend and I finally found a few hours this morning for the unboxing and first use. Let me begin by saying that the current price is quite high and that the buying process itself is […]
A Look Back at the Audi 5000 and Unintended Acceleration
I was in high school in the late 1980’s when NHTSA (pronounced “nit-suh”), Transport Canada, and others studied complaints of unintended acceleration in Audi 5000 vehicles. Looking back on the Audi issues, and in light of my own recent role as an expert investigating complaints of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles, there appears to be a fundamental contradiction between […]
Lethal Software Defects: Patriot Missile Failure
During the Gulf War, twenty-eight U.S. soldiers were killed and almost one hundred others were wounded when a nearby Patriot missile defense system failed to properly track a Scud missile launched from Iraq. The cause of the failure was later found to be a programming error in the computer embedded in the Patriot’s weapons control system. On February […]
Apple’s #gotofail SSL Security Bug was Easily Preventable
If programmers at Apple had simply followed a couple of the rules in the Embedded C Coding Standard, they could have prevented the very serious `Gotofail` SSL bug from entering the iOS and OS X operating systems. Here’s a look at the programming mistakes involved and the easy-to-follow coding standard rules that could have easily prevent the bug. In case […]
Security Risks of Embedded Systems
In the words of security guru and blogger Bruce Schneier “The Internet of Things is Wildly Insecure — and Often Unpatchable”. As Bruce describes the current state of affairs in a recent Wired magazine article: We’re at a crisis point now with regard to the security of embedded systems, where computing is embedded into the hardware itself — as […]
An Update on Toyota and Unintended Acceleration
In early 2011, I wrote a couple of blog posts (here and here) as well as a later article (here) describing my initial thoughts on skimming NASA’s official report on its analysis of Toyota’s electronic throttle control system. Half a year later, I was contacted and retained by attorneys for numerous parties involved in suing Toyota for personal injuries and […]
Intellectual Property Protections for Embedded Software: A Primer
My experiences as a testifying expert witness in numerous lawsuits involving software and source code have taught me a thing or two about the various intellectual property protections that are available to the creators of software. These are areas of the law that you, as an embedded software engineer, should probably know at least a […]
Dead Code, the Law, and Unintended Consequences
Dead code is source code that is not executed in the final system. It comes in two forms. First, there is dead code that is commented out or removed via #ifdef’s. That dead code has no corresponding form in the binary. Other dead code is present in the binary but cannot be or is never […]
Introducing Barr Group
In the ten months since forming Barr Group, I have received many questions about the new company. As we enter the new year, I thought it a good time to use this blog post to answer the most frequently asked questions, such as: What does Barr Group do? Who are Barr Group’s clients? How is Barr […]