Engineering Secure Devices

9SECURE FIRMWARE UPDATE

Security updates are annoying, for consumers, for administrators, and especially for manufacturers. The latter constantly need to watch out for possible vulnerabilities in their products and react to corresponding notifications, while users and administrators have to apply published patches in a timely manner. Since we can regard a device’s security as a volatile state that might change tomorrow, having a solid update strategy is imperative.

However, software update handling is not a trivial process. Only authorized entities should be able to supply updates to devices, and they shouldn’t break device functionality or turn ...