exida explains Blog

2011 was a good year in many ways for Functional Safety and Cyber Security. Several instrumentation products achieved IEC 61508 certification. exida Certification alone issued 64 product certifications (http://www.sael-onine.com).  With most certification projects, improvements to the design and quality are made.  Some manufacturers…

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After a false trip incident, I heard a control engineer express his displeasure with the automatic diagnostics in a new safety rated transmitter.  The transmitter diagnostics were annunciated by sending the analog current out of range.  In this case, the current went to 3.6 milliamps.  The problem was that…

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Last week a security researcher, Dillon Beresford of NSS Labs, presented at the Blackhat conference on the security vulnerabilities he found in Siemens PLC firmware.  One of many stories on Dillon’s findings can be found here.  Among other things, Dillon found “dancing monkeys” in the code!  Actually,…

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How should you react to news of PLC security vulnerabilities? 

Project Basecamp was an exercise conducted at the S4 Security Conference that was held last month in Miami, Florida.  At the event, six security researchers reported their findings on the…

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Stuxnet has, rightly, generated a significant amount of discussion and concern with the industrial automation community.  Fortunately, unless you operate a uranium enrichment facility using Siemens S7 PLC’s and some very specific variable frequency drives (VFDs) you probably haven’t been directly impacted by the Stuxnet…

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A.K.A You’re About to Severely Under-Design your SIF and Put your People at Risk. Twice this week alone, and much more often than I like to remember, I’ve had safety system designers blindly follow certificates that contain data that simply cannot be true. They get a certificate from…

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