I’ve been very busy implementing cryptography code to support a range of devices, some of them quite old for the last couple of years. This has resulted in most of my coding being focused on C++ 1998 (at least one device supported nothing newer) and very simple C# for proof of concept code.

Now that work is winding down I’m looking at getting back up to speed on C++ 2011, 2017 and later features and some full featured C# coding.

I’m hoping that I’ll be doing more modern coding in both languages in the relatively near future. Going to make sure I get some coding done on the home front while things are relatively quiet and look for work related tasks where modern tools and techniques are good things.

Wrapping up the tail end of the tail end of the multicast encryption work here. VxWorks port is looking good and looking forward to new challenges. It has been an interesting three years getting this defined, implemented, handed off to the teams and wrapped up.

It has been a wild ride taking an early stage prototype and building it out to something that is deployable across a line of products. Adding to the challenge was a multicast protocol that is central to the functioning of the systems that isn’t similar enough to anything out there for there to be an off the shelf solution and devices that are low-spec enough that no modern public key solutions perform adequately.

I was surprised to realize how much of the design ended up being key management. The algorithm and packet packaging stuff tends to get most of the attention but making sure that keys are updated and that updates can happen seamlessly without creating coverage gaps (important with ICU monitors) gets quite involved.

Dealing with the issues of systems coming into and out of coverage and devices that are not on or not working properly during key rotation makes things even more of a challenge.

In the end I feel good about the solution and it appears to be rolling out relatively smoothly to the product teams for implementation. The heavy lifting was largely done last fall but tying up loose and and a new platform to target has kept me busy since then…

One of the drives in my disk array just failed this morning. Seems like it has been a bad week for computer hardware here. More irritating at the moment as this is an array and the remaining three disks are keeping things running.

Next step will be locating the failed drive when the replacement arrives sometime in the coming week. The new boot drive helps as well since it has space for working files in the interim.

Last weekend I spent a couple days working through issues around my boot SSD as I worked to upgrade to a 2TB drive to make space for working files on the fast volume. I remain nervous that this machine may start seeing more failures as it gets older. For now it is still doing reasonably well.

Working from home makes my local systems that much more important. I’m doing quite a bit of prototyping that involves network activity. My work laptop can’t see anything local once the VPN is engaged so all of the things I could have done with a USB network adapter creating a small local network for experimental use are off the table when I’m home. I have more compute resources on my home network than I have at work so this isn’t a big issue…but when my local systems have problems that spills over.

Hoping this will get me past most of the problems and next week will be smoother.

Pushing forward with Blender 2.8 and unity with more detailed comments here.

Creative Things

Looking to be a varied and busy winter and spring. I’m hoping to move my unity and blender knowledge forward significantly. I want to get Cluster to a point where it is more a game and less a sand-box for VR experimentation.

Work

Work looks like it is going to be a wild ride as well as I step into a cyber-security role in a big way. I’ve got to finish defining the network and local security design for the product and generate sufficient documentation to convince the FDA that we’ve done our due diligence. Should be do-able but I’m expecting it to keep be very busy.

OpenSSL

I’m looking at getting a Visual Studio 2019 debug build of OpenSSL together locally as well so that I can look into some functionality that I want/need to understand better.

In particular, the ‘envelope’ functionality that provides encryption at rest with multiple access based on private key encryption of a one-time symmetric key could solve a variety of interesting problems.

I need windows (and ideally bcryptlib) based versions of this functionality that inter-operate with the OpenSSL version if possible. Being able to build some sample code and then step through with the visual studio debugger would help quite a bit.

The last year has been rather busy. Changing jobs, coming up to speed at Dräger, unity programming, motion capture and a variety of other pursuits.

Work

The last few months have been largely consumed by the tail end of my time at KMC Systems and coming up to speed at Dräger. I’m now stepping into a cyber-security role on our existing monitoring product. This is an area that I’ve had an interest in for some time but until recently the medical device world has largely tried to meet their security needs with an external firewall with little internal security on the protected network.

The customer base and FDA appear to be rapidly becoming far more aware of computer security issues. I tend to put the down to the rash of recent activity where medical data is encrypted by criminals and a payment demanded for release of the keys. This hits organizations in the pocket book and impacts patient care at the same time (much more visible to these organizations than leaks of personally identifying information). We have rapidly moved from a universe where computer security was viewed as a nuisance to one where it is seen as a requirement.

Much reading and research over the last few weeks to back-fill any gaps in my knowledge I’m aware of and locate tangible back-up for things I know but wasn’t able to back up with authoritative sources. I feel like I’m just about over the steep part of the learning curve now…so next bit of busy will be writing up what I’ve pulled together.

I miss the people I worked with at KMC but I’m much happier with the challenges I’m being presented with here than I was helping out with the tail end of Newton development. Now that I’m finding a bit of breathing room, I need to drop email to some of my friends back at KMC. I know I’m not good at staying in touch, but I intend to work on being better…

VR

Work on VR coding has been pretty well shelved since the beginning of last summer. This is mostly down to the job change and various bits of being busy leading up to that.

I think I’m finally at a point where I can get back to work on that front. I expect to spend some time learning blender 2.8 first. This should help me make more interesting items to incorporate in my unity games.

Once I’ve gotten to where I’m happy with an initial level of blender competency, I’ll switch back to working on the cluster game (see more details on pandamallet and cluster-1 in my github account. I finally uploaded the latest version of the game game code over the holiday…I hadn’t realized that I had done that much work without pushing code but I expect to keep things more in sync now.

I expect to get back to working with 3D tracking of optical beacons with multiple cameras sometime in the future, but probably not until I’ve got much more done with Cluster.

I am clearing the decks in the basement to free up a larger working area for the room-scale VR. Hoping to have most of the back half of the finished part of the basement cleared and the working boundaries expanded appropriately.

Lots more to play with on the VR front, but I’m going to try to limit my distractions in order to get Cluster to a playable point before shooting off in another direction.