Professional Articles

The certification of the functional safety of a system is complex. All the manufacturers involved have to contribute to comply with standards - from the hardware with its BSPs and drivers, through the hypervisor and operating system, to the application code of the OEM and third-party supplier. The operating system, which is optimized specifically for the hardware, and the hypervisor used in mixed-critical systems have a key function here - lying between the hardware and the application. If this…

Hybrid system-on-chips increasingly integrate heterogeneous processors. However, developers see them as one component that they want to develop as integrated as possible. A homogeneous RTOS and hypervisor ecosystem for both MPU- and MMU-supported processors provides the critical convenience gain.

When developing embedded systems that are to be real-time capable, one of the first and most important questions is whether the applications should run under a real-time operating system (RTOS) or whether a bare-metal solution should be developed. Bare-metal programming is generally understood to mean that an application is written directly on the hardware without using an external programming interface, i.e. an operating system. Applications access here directly hardware registers of…

While the EN standards 50128, 50129, 50126 and most recently EN 50657 have a strong focus on safety certification of COTS-based systems in the railway industry, they only partly deal with security issues. However, security is becoming more and more important, as closed systems are giving way to networked environments with wired and wireless connectivity. Safety-related systems in trains and signalling need to be protected from cyber threats in order to guarantee both integrity and availability.…

With the increasing use of networked digital technologies in safety-critical areas of railway operations, the requirements for cyber security, which must be considered together with functional safety, are growing. In the HASELNUSS project, a safety platform is being developed that allows the joint operation of safety and security applications on one system.

In the latest issue of Global Railway Review, Dr. Sergey Tverdyshev (Director of Research & Technology at SYSGO) talks about security certifications of railway systems considering the MILS concept. He is the technical leader of the certMILS project – certMILS aims to protect critical infrastructure against cyber-attacks by compositional security certification to deliver a certified Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) platform. But how can this be applied to railway systems?

In many applications in the railways, aircraft or automotive industry the interaction between safety and security is of particular importance, since there are many dependencies between them and they can therefore no longer be considered separately.

The European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) forms the basis for standardization in relation to train control systems (ETCS), command control and safety technology, and Integrated Electronic Control Centres (IECC) in Europe [ETC16]. The previous HW/SW systems in these fields followed a monolithic integration approach applied by the individual manufacturers. This harbours problems relating to the compatibility of the systems of the various manufacturers, creates dependencies and reduces…