Security Blanket
Protecting Your System in an Age of Paranoia

The year is 2010. Alone in the kitchen, 8 year-old Mikey pulls a cereal container down from the cupboard. He presses the "open" button. A tiny camera with a wide-angle lens grabs an image. Inside the lid, a low-cost embedded system with hardware video processing locates Mikey's key facial features in the image and creates an identification map. It then downloads from the household wireless network a current database of the family members allowed access to that cereal at this time of day. Mikey is on the "disallowed" list. The lock holds fast. A text notification is already on its way to both parents' mobile phones. Mikey is busted!

Security is a growing concern in almost every type of system design today. Some applications have a more pressing need than others, of course. The consequences of Mikey subverting the automated cereal protection system and downing a few unauthorized grams of carbohydrates are far less severe than, say, a security failure in an airliner engine control system. Almost all systems these days have at least rudimentary security concerns. In a few cases, security is paramount.

A somewhat undesirable corollary to Moore's Law might say that the more gates we have available, the more we'll tend to use. Why connect a simple switch directly to a control line when we can add a microcontroller that allows us to use a button, de-bounce the press action, check the status of the day/night condition, and illuminate the appropriate status LED? We sprinkle superfluous software and hardware into our systems like Emeril adding the final "Bam!" of seasoning to some exotic culinary creation.

The consequence of this complexity explosion is a trend toward systems with a plethora of security vulnerabilities. Usually, we don't care. But in the cases where we do, the difficulty of maintaining rigorous security grows almost exponentially as the complexity of our basic system rises. Throw Moore's Law into the mix, and you end up with double security holes squared. Not a pretty picture for the paranoid. [more]