QNX Announces First RTOS to Help Device Manufacturers Achieve Both Safety and Security Certification

QNX Neutrino Realtime Operating System (RTOS) Certified Plus™ is the only RTOS to offer both IEC 61508 certification at Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL 3) and Common Criteria ISO/IEC 15408 certfication at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL 4+).

“QNX Neutrino RTOS Certified Plus is an industry first, providing a significant competitive advantage to device manufacturers who must address rigorous demands for safety and security,” stated Derek Kuhn, vice president, sales and marketing, QNX Software Systems. “Our engineers have delivered the first product offering combining safety and security certification that can change the way companies bring products to market by reducing the time and expense required for them to get their end-products certified.”

Many of the systems vital to our daily living, work, and health are now controlled by software running on microprocessors embedded in cars, medical devices, power plants, and the energy grid. As the software complexity of these systems increases, so does the need for software components certified to meet stringent dependability and security requirements — these systems cannot fail.
Certification to IEC 61508 SIL 3 provides independent validation that QNX Neutrino RTOS Certified Plus delivers a very high level of reliability and risk reduction when used in safety-critical systems for medical, transportation, energy generation, process control, and other industries. Certification to the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation provides validation from a certified laboratory that QNX Neutrino RTOS Certified Plus fulfills the functional security requirements and the enhanced methodologies and security controls required for EAL 4+.

Designed for systems that have low tolerance for failure, QNX Neutrino RTOS Certified Plus employs a modular microkernel architecture in which applications, device drivers, file systems, and networking stacks all run as separate, memory-protected components. It is the only certified RTOS to support the parallelism necessary for successful multi-core designs. It also supports adaptive partitioning, an efficient form of CPU time partitioning that prevents malicious code and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks from monopolizing the CPU.

QNX Neutrino RTOS Certified Plus is also POSIX-compliant, which allows application developers great flexibility to port applications to the platform.