printer friendly version

Security and privacy: Is one without the other possible?

The contrasting urgency and importance of security and privacy in the consumer and industrial world can be shown in the simple example of an automobile with advanced assisted driving capabilities. Inadequate protection for user privacy could mean that an unauthorised third party could snoop on a log of the car's journeys as the data is in transit between the vehicle and, for example, the driver’s insurer. This might feel intrusive, but usually it will have no important consequences for the driver.

Inadequate security protection, on the other hand, could allow a malicious actor to take over or corrupt the vehicle’s driver assistance system, compromising the driver’s ability to maintain safe operation. The conclusion seems cut-and-dried: privacy protection is a nice-to-have, but security protection is a must-have.

Except this is not really true, for at least two reasons.

First, just because an instance of a breach of privacy might not have important safety consequences does not mean it is not harmful. If a consumer, when buying a car, does not have a clear and explicit understanding that personal data, such as the routes and times of their journeys, their driving style and so on, risk falling into the wrong hands, then the car maker should be under a duty to keep them private. The same should go for any other connected device. After all, no one likes the feeling that they are being spied on.

Secondly, a breach of privacy in settings other than a consumer’s car can have extremely serious consequences. This is even truer for industrial or commercial systems than for consumer products. For example, the control system of an energy generation plant could send data about its spare generation capacity over the energy company’s network. This private information could be commercially valuable to competitors. Malicious actors could even use it to time a cyberattack on a nation’s power grid to cause maximum harm or inconvenience.

The value of data sanitation

So, OEMs have at least a moral duty to protect privacy as much as security. In fact, the basic principles of data privacy are straightforward. If security protection is about keeping people out of an embedded device, privacy protection safeguards the data inside the device. This means:

• Collecting and storing no more data than is necessary for the device to perform its functions.

• Anonymising the data collected or stored.

• Encrypting data at rest and before transmission.

This can be thought of as data sanitation: cleaning up data stores and eliminating the accumulation of ‘waste’, or unnecessary data, to reduce the size of the attack surface open to malicious actors.

Privacy protection built into the FoundriesFactory platform

OEMs could be forgiven for feeling weary about the concept of privacy. After all, is it not just one more thing to implement, besides security, which is already a big enough task?

Privacy protection features add surprisingly little overhead for users of the FoundriesFactory platform, who already benefit from a set of features that support security best practices and the latest regulations, such as the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act. Secure boot, CVE readiness, security-focused over-the-air updates, and more are integral parts of the FoundriesFactory development and device management flow.

Activating specific privacy features in the platform alongside the security-focused features is straightforward. For example, the Linux microPlatform (LmP) operating system, which underpins the FoundriesFactory platform, can be configured to implement memory randomisation in the Linux kernel.

If a hostile actor were to breach a device’s security protection, the easiest way to inspect the data on the device would be to study the processor’s memory. The LmP uses features in the Linux kernel to break up sequences of data stored in this memory into chunks, and then to randomise the locations in which the chunks are stored, making it difficult for a third party to recombine the data into their original sequence.

Other features supported in the FoundriesFactory system provide additional privacy protections: customer support engineers can provide comprehensive information to customers and training on how to take advantage of it.

So, the takeaway for customers is that if security is important, so is privacy, and tools that support privacy protection are present in the same FoundriesFactory platform that enables management of embedded device security.

Share this article:

Further reading: