Introduction

We are proud to announce that we are taking part in the Digital Security by Design programme!

Digital Catapult is the UK authority on advanced digital technology. Along with other companies, we will be working with prototype cybersecurity technology which could massively affect the future of cybersecurity.

Dynamic Devices have been given access to ARM’s Morello SoC and development board which is an industrial demonstrator of a capabiility architecture (CHERI) developed by ARM and Cambridge University. Morello implements a CHERI-extended ARMv8-A processor, GPU, peripherals and memory subsystem. This board will play a vital role for our research into the CHERI architecture.

The vast majority of cyber attacks exploit conventional hardware and software memory vulnerabilities. To overcome this issue, University of Cambridge researchers with colleagues at SRI International developed CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), a novel instruction set architecture that could stop two thirds of cyber attacks.

As part of the project, Arm designed and built a prototype system on a chip (SoC) and demonstrator board, the Arm Morello board, which was made available to UK businesses for industrial evaluation earlier in 2022. The DSbD Technology Access Programme, managed by Digital Catapult, allows companies to experiment with the Morello board.

– digicatapult.org.uk

In the picture, you can see the ARM Morello board which we will be working on for the next 6 months.

Aim for the DSbD Programme

In terms of what Dynamic Devices wants to accomplish with this programme, we hope to work with the existing Morello build support and integrate this to the greatest extent possible into the Yocto Embedded Linux build system resulting in an accrediated Yocto Compatible meta-cheri layer.

What we’ve done so far

So far, we have:

• Built Cheri-BSD for Morello and QEMU.
• Installed Cheri-BSD onto the Morello board.
• Tested purecap/capabilities on Cheri-BSD with example tests and also developed our own programs to test the secure architecture.
• Researched on Linux/Android for Morello
• Built Android for Morello
• Researched into Yocto support for Cheri

Conclusion

We would like to offer a massive thank you to Digital Catapult for enabling Dynamic Devices be a part of the Digital Security by Design programme. It is fantastic to be working alongside so many other innovative companies to further research these technologies which will undoubtedly shape the future of cybersecurity.

This programme is 6 months long and we will provide updates as we progress our research into CHERI & Morello.

See related information for the DSbD here on Twitter & LinkedIn.

Introduction to our Digital Marketing Display

We were contacted by local SMEs asking if we could help them to create a low cost, easily maintained digital marketing display to go into local shops here in Liverpool, UK. This seemed an interesting project and something that we could build with Balena Cloud so we took a look… 

The Hardware (Display + Computer)

At the present time, the SME had a pretty standard low cost display monitor with a VESA 100 mounting at the back, so we decided to look at how to mount a Raspberry Pi on the back of this, connect it to BalenaCloud and look at how we could then display slideshows of marketing material for them.

You can see the back of the display on the left.

The Cloud

Balena

Firstly, we created a new Fleet within Balena for this project, downloaded an image to uSD Card and added this Raspberry Pi onto the BalenaCloud. The dashboard for this can be seen below.

Afterwards, we then added two blocks as services, the Balena Browser block, and the Balena Audio block.

Additionally, the Browser block allows us to run up a full screen “kiosk mode” web-browser which we can then use to display a wide variety of content. The Audio block supports the Browser block for audio output although this is not really needed for the digital marketing display.

We can configure the block with Balena environment variables. Details are on the Browser Block GitHub page. We have configured it here for full screen mode with a specific LAUNCH_URL which it loads on startup

Also, one of the issues we found is that if the vc4-fkms-v3d overlay is loaded we don’t seem to get audio out. You can remove this and then you do get audio!

Google

So the next question is… how can we easily create some content to display on this screen. As it is a web-browser we can display pretty much anything you can display on a normal PC but for small business we wanted a really straightforward way to manage slideshows. Enter Google Slides…

Evidently, we created a simple four slide Google Slides slideshow as you can see here:

Not everybody realises how easy it is to publish Google projects directly onto the web, and you can do this with your slideshow with File->Publish To the Web

We create an embedded link as shown on the left.

NB. We modified the HTML a little to remove the Google Slides notification bar:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSe4Xl9N9ZfXqC0wkIKCf8iFEvsklvPBMoaNO8boLQiWISafu1y2bOKIg7hWYvy1PA8WGSrPj79GOcn/embed?start=true&amp;rm=minimal&amp;loop=true&amp;delayms=10000" frameborder="0" width="1920" height="1080" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

So if you browse to this page you will see whatever the latest slideshow is!

See: https://www.williamsonsfamilybutchers.com/shop-display

And sure enough, when you boot up our Digital Marketing Display you see this slideshow!

Costs for the Digital Marketing Display

On the whole, the Bill of Materials so far for this project, excluding the actual display itself. It comes to about £106. This could be reduced by laser cutting the VESA mounting brackets and enclosure for the Raspberry Pi.