By Caspar Gries, Security Engineer
In my R&T day job here at SYSGO, I mostly deal with funded projects as well as Common Criteria product certification. This means that I regularly meet with fellow engineers from business partners, but rarely see any of our customers, much less get a chance to talk to them.
Therefore, when being asked to support our team at the EW 2018, I didn’t think twice to take the opportunity. Being an exhibitor is of course not just fun and excitement from start to end. There’s a lot of preparation going on behind the curtains beforehand. Attending the fair itself can also be very exhausting (or so I’d heard).
The booth I was assigned to was located in the Safety & Security area, just a short walk from our main SYSGO booth. Once everything was set up and the EW 2018 started, it all felt like a blur. Listening to the user stories of dozens of different people, explaining my demonstrator while racing to come up with a conclusive idea how our products might come into play in order to solve the visitor’s engineering problem. Even the slack times with less traffic went by fairly quickly.
So, what did the demonstrator at my booth actually do?
We showed a PikeOS-based system, where multiple applications interact with each other to replace the contents of a partition over-the-air in a safe and secure way. This can for example be used to update the map database in a car infotainment system, or to deliver security updates to an embedded Linux system, or a plethora of other use cases.
Clearly, the demo had a distinctive “retro” feel to it. No fancy 3D graphics, just scrolling text consoles. It had the nice side effect of acting as an “engineer magnet” and lead to a number of interesting conversations.
My personal take-away is that security concerns are quickly becoming more relevant in domains that previously only had to worry about safety. That’s especially true for the automotive and industrial area, where the huge increase in connectivity opens up all kinds of new attack vectors for hackers.
In summary, the EW 2018 was a very positive experience for me. A big thank you goes to my colleagues from Marketing and Sales for giving me such a friendly welcome and all the support. I really felt as part of the team and would be happy to join in again at any time.
More information at www.sysgo.com/pikeos
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Pocket
RSS
