SPREN1 Logs
Protect the product user, the customer and the company; protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of customer data; ensure product safety, reliability and data protection; comply with laws and regulations; and fulfil market and customer requirements.
The goals widen...
Q What is the IEC 62443 series designed for, which fields refer to it, and which field uses its own st...
It is designed for industrial automation and control systems (IACS), with parts for system integrators and operators and parts for product developers. Railway, medical and aviation guidance refer to it. Automotive uses ISO/SAE 21434 instead.
IEC 62443 grew out of the industrial w...
Q How is the product cybersecurity lifecycle structured, and what sits underneath both halves?
Two loops meet at the secure product: secure product development before launch, post-launch product security after it. Both rest on management systems, risk management, development and production security, supply chain security, and culture and training.
* The development loop e...
Q What are Cybersecurity Assurance Levels (CALs) in ISO/SAE 21434, and what do they influence?
CALs classify how much assurance effort a vehicle component needs. A higher CAL means stricter testing, lower risk tolerance and more independent assessment.
ISO/SAE 21434 is the cybersecurity engineering standard for road vehicles. A CAL (CAL 1 to CAL 4)
is assigned to a compone...
Q What is the goal of the secure sourcing phase, and what typically goes wrong?
Make sure externally sourced components meet the security requirements and are integrated securely.
Most products are largely made of things the company didn't write: commercial libraries, open
source, cloud services and outsourced development. The Project Lead is responsible.
D...
Q What is the goal of the security testing phase, and what are its steps and pitfalls?
Show that the security controls work and stay intact once all components are integrated, and test the complete system for vulnerabilities, internally or externally. It ends with a security testing report and follow-up on every finding.
The Test Manager is responsible. It needs te...
Q What counts as a "product" in product cybersecurity?
Anything a company sells or provides to customers that contains digital elements: physical devices, mass-deployed software, and cloud services provided to customers.
The term covers far more than consumer gadgets. An insulin pump, a car, a train, a PLC in a
factory, a smart watch...
Q Where do product security requirements come from, and what makes collecting them hard?
From product safety regulations, industry-specific requirements, privacy and data protection laws, IoT security laws, cybersecurity laws, market-specific regulations, and security standards and guidelines. Collecting them is hard because laws conflict across markets, data must st...
Q What are the eight practices of IEC 62443-4-1, and how is maturity graded?
SM security management, SR specification of security requirements, SD secure by design, SI secure implementation, SVV security verification and validation testing, DM management of security-related issues, SUM security update management, SG security guidelines. Each practice is r...
Q Why does product security have to plan for a much longer horizon than information security?
A product ships to customers and stays in the field for 10 to 20+ years, so it must be patchable and supportable long after the team that built it has moved on.
Information security protects the company's own IT. It can replace a server every five years, and
it can patch on its o...