Defense in Depth: 10 Practical Lessons
A single bad memory access was enough to permanently lock an entire system based on a popular SoC. Here are ten practical lessons from investigating and mitigating that failure. The previous two articles started from a very concrete failure on the i.MX8M Plus: a single access to certain physical addresses can lock the complete SoC […]
Embedded Post-Quantum Security Starts Now
Think quantum computing is the next decade’s threat? Think again. If your hardware ships this year, it’s already a today problem. It’s easy to dismiss Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) as a problem for the 2030s. After all, RSA and ECC are not broken today, and cryptographically relevant quantum computers are still generally expected around the 2030 […]
Defense in Depth in Practice: Prevent, Contain, Recover
Finding a hardware weakness is only the first step. The more useful question is what we can do to prevent it, contain it, or recover when prevention fails. The previous article described a particularly unpleasant weakness on a popular embedded platform: a single physical memory transaction can lock up the whole system, including the application […]
De l’âne Lolo à l’IA générative : le piège du résultat
En 1910, un âne a peint une toile exposée au Salon des Indépendants. Aujourd’hui, cette histoire me revient chaque fois qu’un utilisateur d’IA pense avoir remplacé des décennies d’ingénierie… Au début du siècle dernier, l’écrivain Roland Dorgelès et quelques complices décidèrent de tendre un piège au monde de l’art parisien. Ils attachèrent un pinceau à […]
Defense in Depth, When the Unexpected Happens
Cybersecurity usually starts at the periphery by blocking attack vectors. But what if the failure comes from the inside? An attacker needs both an exploitable weakness and a way to reach it. Firewalls, authentication, secure boot, access control, restricted physical interfaces and similar measures are designed to close those paths. That is essential. But it […]
Where Did Embedded Engineering Go?
Open almost any embedded systems news feed today and one topic dominates everything: generative AI. Where did the rest of engineering go? Generative AI: people promote it, criticize it, publish recipes, show what they generated in a few hours, warn about the risks, or explain why everyone else is using it incorrectly. Where are Linux, […]
Technical Debt: Are We Arguing About the Problem or the Name?
Recently, I have witnessed several surprisingly heated discussions about technical debt. Interestingly, the disagreement was rarely about how to reduce it, how much it costs, or how it affects engineering teams. In fact, the disagreement was often about whether the situation being discussed qualified as technical debt at all. In many cases, the objection came […]
Embedded Cartography: Architecture Beats Optimization
This second article continues a two-part story inspired by a real industrial project carried out for a railway OEM. The first article described how a classical OpenStreetMap rendering architecture was successfully deployed onboard embedded rolling stock. This second part explores how rethinking the rendering pipeline itself led to significantly better performance and efficiency. The first […]
The Market Clock Doesn’t Care About Your Delay
A one-month delay on a product development project is one more month of engineering costs and burn rate, right? Wrong. It is far more expensive than that. Embedded products live within two hard limits: project start, decided by the OEM end of commercial life, decided by the market The hard truth is the market clock […]
Embedded Cartography: Rising to the Challenge
This first article is inspired by a real industrial project carried out for a railway OEM. It describes the successful deployment of an OpenStreetMap rendering architecture on an embedded platform, with surprisingly good results given the modest hardware resources and the density of railway infrastructure data involved. A second article will explore how the original […]