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Having their software run in a Windows ecosystem that they do not have strict configuration management control over was a bad decision and on the basis of this failure report. That it did not result in patient injury or death was fortunate but is certainly not guaranteed.
No matter what OS you choose it is vulnerable to viruses. You and I will agree that the odds are your Windows system is much more at risk by at least an order of magnitude. But the IA people who demanded that this system run antivirus are just as likely to demand that Linux run antivirus, simply because the vulnerability theoretically exists and making that demand fulfills their CYA requirements. I've worked on standalone Linux systems that IA demanded have antivirus.
> Either you own that decision, and as part of your support your tool provides the necessary antivirus and you also insure through testing configuration management that its configured appropriately, or you choose a different option up to an including writing your own system to manage the "time critical bits".
According to the article, the software runs on the user's hardware. While they certainly could have made a decision to provide their own controlled hardware, it's entirely possible that hospital was not open to that option for cost reasons, for IT management reasons, whatever.
> No matter what OS you choose it is vulnerable to
> viruses.
By writing just enough "OS" to achieve your goals in an embedded system, and then designing a clean access API through which you cannot affect the underlying code (no "here download this new firmware" call) you can avoid that particular threat vector.
it is a common misconception that Windows is still worse a platform than Linux when it comes to security. Not trolling ... I'm using Linux since '96 and built my life and career on it. Opinion of some people in infosec circles (@thegrugq @csoghoian ...) is that Windows no longer lags behind:
https://grugq.github.io/presentations/COMSEC%20beyond%20encr...
This may be theoretically true, but it is not practically the case. There is a reason Linux and OS X users almost never use antivirus software.
Using Windows on a medical device is inexcusable. It's a heart monitor, not a game system.
Today, doctors from a hospital the other side of the country can diagnose your cancer realtime while you are still in the MRI machine, and they do it with Windows, because that's what humans know and use.
Probably because they've been exposed to it in a many settings, for better or for worse. Windows being popular does not imply that Windows is appropriate for any given task.
> Why shouldn't the devices use Windows?
Is this a serious question?
Windows is probably the least stable production OS in the world today.
Windows is extremely bloated compared to an appropriate embedded OS.
Windows is (practically speaking) the only OS where antivirus software is a fact of life. Viruses should not be a concern for medical equipment.
Windows is not even close to real-time.
I don't want to see "Your heart monitor is restarting for updates in 3... 2... 1..."
> and they do it with Windows
This may be technically true, but this in no way implies that Windows is uniquely suited for or appropriate for the task. They could also do it using a PlayStation, but this is probably not an appropriate platform.
That's not true for what those systems should be really running which is separation kernel platforms. These isolated tasks in partitions using high-assurance kernels designed to not fail in every way you can think of and with almost no code to hit. The apps even donate their own resources for kernel calls. Interface is in untrusted VM that sends checked commands to real software running on isolated partition optionally on Ada or Java runtime for memory-safety. Anti-virus is not available and not necessary given the untrusted part is strongly contained & the trusted part is memory safe.
http://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integrity-do-178...
https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/papers_ps/nizza.pdf
Just a matter of using right tools for the job. Any medical device using Windows or any other complex OS isn't doing it right. Even OpenBSD would've been a better choice given it rarely is hacked, crashes, or needs updates. Antivirus software wouldn't run as it's not available for these. It would be a network appliance or something that didn't affect running system.