Reply to post: Why is insecurity 'inevitable'?

It's nearly 2019, and your network can get pwned through an oscilloscope

Martin Gregorie

Why is insecurity 'inevitable'?

Subject says it all. It doesn't seem so inevitable to me.

Given that many of the light-weight realtime OSes you might find running instruments such as oscilloscopes often have little security [1], an obvious, simple and cheap way to secure the instrument would be to fit, say, a RaspberryPi model B inside a spare corner of the case and use it as a built-in network front end. For very little money this would provide a firewall and a reasonably capable login mechanism in addition to acting as a GUI for the 'scope. As a bonus it could also buffer and queue output sent networked printers and plotters or support one or two USB connections to local devices.

[1] I used Microware's OS/9 for several years. Its a capable and very reliable OS both for desktop and realtime uses, but security? not so much apart from a login and file permission bits which are there as much for keeping the idly curious out and protection against fat fingering: you can easily run it in single user mode if you want. In this I don't think its all that different from any other small realtime OS.

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