McAfee Security to Be Integrated Into VxWorks

The RSA Conference leads to a lot of press releases. The announcement that caught my attention was McAfee and Wind River Announce Strategic Agreement for Security Protection Beyond the PC. Wind River’s VxWorks is a popular OS for field device CPU and Ethernet cards so this could be a step forward for PLC and RTU security.

Our customers across nearly all market segments have elevated embedded security to a top priority,” said Ken Klein, president, Wind River. “Together with McAfee, we will deliver the most comprehensive security solutions in the embedded industry, with security solutions designed to protect all layers of the software stack. This will address our customers’ concerns and protect their embedded devices as they are increasingly used on public and private networks.

There was little more than that in the press release, but another paragraph from a Wind River blog entry caught my attention:

Only Wind River and McAfee can support the broad types of security vulnerabilities effecting embedded devices today. By combining Wind River’s core security-certified runtime technologies, with McAfee’s whitelisting, anti-malware and global threat intelligence capabilities, we’ll be able to support a broad array of connected M2M capable devices for industrial automation, energy, medical, networking, consumer electronics, aerospace and defense.

I hope they more attention to integrating the whitelisting and host IPS than the traditional McAfee anti-virus which has been broken for years. It bears watching, and perhaps this will push other field device vendors with proprietary OS to start partnering up with security vendors.

Photo from Fidgets by Jeff