June 20, 2012 – Icon Labs integrated its Floodgate Packet Filter, an embedded software firewall, with Freescale Semiconductor’s MQX Operating System running on its Kinetis, Vybrid, Coldfire and PowerQUICC families of microprocessors and microcontrollers (MCUs). Floodgate Packet Filter provides a critical layer of security that provides critical protection against Internet-based attacks targeting embedded devices. Floodgate provides rules-based filtering allowing whitelisting and blacklisting based on criteria such as port number, protocol, or source IP address. Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) provides dynamic packet filtering based on the state of a connection.
Threshold-based filtering protects against denial of service attacks, broadcast storms, and other conditions that result in a flood of unwanted packets. Researchers from Columbia University’s Intrusion Detection Systems Lab have shown embedded devices are far more vulnerable to Internet-based threats than Enterprise Networks. The researchers have established a global average vulnerability rate for devices such as home routers, cable modems, and webcams, of 41.62% compared to 2.46% for enterprise devices.
As network connectivity in embedded devices has become commonplace and our reliance on these devices has grown, so has the importance of protecting these devices from Internet-based threats.
