The gateway to cyber-immunity.

Hi folks!

Herewith – a brief interlude to my ongoing meandering Tales from the Permafrost Side. And what better interlude could there be than an update on a momentous new K-product launch?!

Drum roll, cymbal!…

We’re launching and officially presenting to the world our first fully ‘cyber-immune’ solution for processing industrial data – the death knell for traditional cybersecurity heralding in a new era of ‘cyber immunity’ – at least (for now) for industrial systems and the Internet of Things (IoT)!

So, where is this cyber-immune solution? Actually – in my pocket! ->

Not to be confused with a 90s cellphone…

… It is in fact a magical industrial (4.0!) box of tricks, able to protect… a whole factory! Such are the wonders of cutting-edge design, pioneering technologies, and miniaturization:

And so, let me introduce you to our new Kaspersky IoT Secure Gateway (KISG) 100 – the first of a range of cyber-immune products for industrial IoT infrastructure, which is currently heading out to the market! And we developed this solution with our subsidiary Aprotech based on KasperskyOS and Siemens SIMATIC IOT2040 hardware.

I say ‘introducing’ you to this new bit of wonder-kit, but it may already sound familiar to the more regular readers of this blog. That’s because just the other day in the fall of last year (how time flies) the prototype of this wonder-kit won a prestigious award at the World Internet Conference in the touristy Chinese-Venice, Wuzhen, that award being for ‘World Leading Internet Scientific and Technological Achievement’! But that was the prototype. Now it’s a finished, full-fledged product raring to go. And it looks like this:

Kaspersky IoT Secure Gateway (KISG) 100

This unassuming 1980s cassette Walkman little box is able to hook up, for example, industrial CNC machine tools and smart sensors with industrial IoT-platform services, which provide built-in protection of telemetry data collected from the equipment. Then that data is safely transferred to the cloud.

Our operating system makes the gateway resistant to most types of cyberattack. Such a product – with inbuilt cyber-immunity – will help raise the continuity of production, in such a way organically embedding itself in the modern concept of smart industry (Industry 4.0) with its truly revolutionary approach.

The more knowledgeable reader may ask: ‘But do we really need another gateway? There already exist gateways based on Linux and other embedded platforms? What’s so special about yours?’

Here’s what:

Our gateway possesses a minimalistic (and that means simple and reliable) microkernel. To compare, the microkernel of KasperskyOS for this gateway contains 17,000 lines of code; such a kernel on Linux for a similar class of solution contains… nine million!

The architecture of a gateway on Linux is practically flat. Lucky ‘privileged’ (root) users can see all the nuances of the architecture inside. Whereas with a cyber-immune gateway in MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security), every single component operates in an isolated domain. A cyberattack on one of the components doesn’t lead to maliciousness possibly penetrating any of the other domains.

And the icing on the cake…

With standard Linux, on gateways of such a class, security policies are associated with several operations with files at once. Thus, real security spreads from the gateway across corporate apps – and what actual mode of protection is used on a specific gateway is unknown to the security officer. Whereas with a gateway on KasperskyOS, a policy is implemented describing the principle aims of security (the main one: ‘access to equipment not permitted’), and the gateway itself interacts exclusively with the microkernel.

Our K-teams just this week presented our Kaspersky IoT Secure Gateway (KISG) 100 at the German industrial exhibition Hannover Messe 2021 (April 12-16).

Btw: the last time we were at Hannover Messe was in 2019. Last year the annual event was cancelled outright due to the pandemic, while this year it will be 100% online. Oh well; main thing – it wasn’t cancelled ).

And that’s all for today folks. From a virtual Hanover – over and out!…