Re:Urgent/11 – Zero Day Vulnerabilities Impacting VxWorks
by jaclaz on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @03:00PM
(#20689103)
Well, that Armis labs is reprinting a statement from VxWorks is a possibility, but the statement is on Armis page, and sounds like they themselves wrote it, since it is an announcement on discovered (by Armis) vulnerabilities, there are as I see it two possibilities:
1) Armis tested those certified environments and couldn't replicate the bugs
2) Armis did not test those certified environments and reprinted the VxWorks statement
If #2 they should have written instead "we could not test the vulnerabilities on the "certified" versions but we believe in VxWorks' assurance that they are not vulnerable (because ... )"
What will happen is you'll purchase a certificate for the RTOS kernel plus a few critical components. Then you can choose to use any other off-the-shelf components that the vendor or third parties provide. Those parts don't have to be safety-critical, but if a defect is found in uncertified software it's not VxWorks's problem.
VxWorks is very clearly and concisely stating that the safety-critical certified components are not affected. But they're not going to make statements about the systems their safety-critical clients built. That's not their responsibility. And Armis is almost certainly reprinting a statement from VxWorks. Both Armis and VxWorks are leaving it up to each VxWorks customer to determine whether their particular configuration of Safety-Critical VxWorks uses a vulnerable stack as an add-on.