All the small things

Last week I gave an interview for my companies developer network. Of course such thing isn’t much of a big deal. I mean it’s the company you are working for - they are always looking for content for their website, but for me however this was different. In my blog I usually tend to talk about technical things and not so much about the actual things I am working on. This has several reasons, for one I am kinda happy to be able to be involved in more than just one thing. Diversity is great, because it gives you the chance to think outside the box, so it became a hobby of mine to do some small side project to get to know different technologies just for fun. Another reason is that you never know what your allowed to say. Is this topic meant to be communicated to the outside or not, is it strategic,… you know what I am talking about.

In the interview, I had the chance to actually talk about our latest development and highlight some of the amazing things we are working on. Being involved in OSGi for years now, I got to see quiet some OSGi based projects and designs and believe me most of them seem like toy projects compared to the degree of OSGi utilization the team I am working in has achieved. Working with OSGi behind the curtains for about 4 years we have several products based on a core framework, which is currently driven towards the first product line that is actually worth being called so. Unfortunately I have to note that only very little of this credit belongs to me. Most of it was done before I joined the company. Although it was the reason, why I joined, I am still amazed by how much we are working on the cutting - sometimes more “bleeding” - edge, like OSGi security. I don’t want to sound like some marketing guy promoting something, but if you’re interested in the technology and are looking for real applications running in the field - have a look at my interview. Enough said… Many thanks to my team for the great work and the inspiring and friendly environment one just have to love working in.

Cheers,
Mirko

Usually when I am blogging, I am talking about the latest technology, standards or general trends. This time however, I wonna talk about politics. No, not about the elections in US, but about politics in software development practiced by the big players to achieve their business goals. Don’t get me wrong from the start. I think this is completely normal in general. We all are trying to achieve our goals the one way or the other, but something just doesn’t feel right…

Yesterday I read about the latest news concerning Sun’s plans about the future of JSR 277, JSR 294 and its new plans on inventing componentization for its JVM called Jigsaw. I hate to say it, but for me, it seems like Sun behaves like a small child trying to insist to be the one driving all development and not letting someone else play with its toys. It’s anything but the behavior of a well establish and industry leading company or one who wants to become one. First they completely ignored the problem of componentization in Java while persuing enterprise development with J(2)EE and missed their chance to actually set the foundation for real software reuse what you would expect from and enterprise ready language specification. Later, when OSGi began to rise they started the JSR 277 and tried to create a competing standard in secret, which didn’t work out too well as we all know. Now, because of the pressure of the community and the lack of showing a better solution they are abandoning the JSR and start developing their own “internal” componentization approach with the Jigsaw project. Of course they are claiming it is not intended to be used outside their own use case for componentizing the JVM, but it is hard for me to believe this. Call me paranoid, but for me it sounds much more like an attempt to develop another system, which after completion is suddenly moved into an official standard. Sun’s statement that they are going to revive JSR 294 and are inviting even the OSGi Alliance to participate to work on it feels more like a distraction so that Sun is able to pursue its plans with Jigsaw in private that without public notice they suddenly can come up with a self made de-facto standard. Again, I might be to paranoid, but it just doesn’t feel right. Is all that just a coincident? I don’t think so. Why can’t they embrace the work done already and see it as a great chance to propel their Language and create a true reusable software stack, no other vendor can offer? Hal Hildebrand just blogged about Sun’s attempt to introduce this new project and the way they are trying to persuade big industry players about their great intents… Well, you should really read his post about it and please tell me, if they have such humble goals, why does everyone they consult have to sign a NDA? I strongly believe that if those ideas are so great, why not share them and let the community decide and participate?

To wrap things up, I ask all of you who feel like me, share you’re opinion! Comment on Hal’s post, blog about it, link to it, spread the word. I believe we - as a community - have to stand up and say what we think to show Sun, that those kind of guerrilla tactics, especially when so easily to look through are not working. Keep your eyes open and don’t fall for the dark side

Cheers,
Mirko

After being involved in OSGi for a couple of years now, I finally had the chance to attend one of the community events. I have to admit, I was kinda nervous. I talked to so many people in the community for so long through the mailing list or personal mails, but actually never really met one of the folks there, so this was the moment to meet them in person. It was kind a weird, it felt a bit like finally meeting someone you got to know by one of the online flirt portals (not that I ever did something like that, but that’s how I would have imagined it ). You know the prejudice that Computer Scientists are all nerds and freaky to some extend, so this was really exciting. In short, I wasn’t disappointed - more the opposite! I haven’t met anyone I don’t like! Especially Richard Hall(Apache Felix lead), Jan Rellermeyer(ETH Zuerich), Michael Keith(Oracle) and Jo Ritter(ProSyst) seam not only to be really nice guys, but are also very good speakers. So if you have the chance to attend one of their talks, it is worth attending!

Besides the talks of the already mentioned speakers, there were several other talks I like. Namely the talk of Hans Bossenbroek for Luminis, Jon Bostrom (MobiNoir Consulting) and of course the Key Note of Peter Kriens. To go deeper and talk about every single talk would just be too much for this post, but all the talks either gave me some good insights or were just fun to watch. Well done! I am more technical oriented, so unfortunately the first day wasn’t as interesting for me as the last one was, but I think this is the tradeoff of such an event.

Socializing wise speaking, this conference was pretty good as well. I talked to many interesting people and gained a lot of insight of the community. You can’t imagine how many companies are using OSGi for years now, but are just not talking about it. It is really impressive to see how far they have gone and what they have achieved with OSGi. I really think in the near future, we can expect to see many new areas, where OSGi will become the defacto standard.

Concerning the talk I gave on Wednesday, I just can say that I am more than happy with the feedback. The room was so packed that some people even had to stand, which didn’t really helped me with my nervousness After my talk, I had the chance to talk to several people about security, their experiences and new ways how to tackle the problem I outlined during my presentation. I think, we are on a good way to come up with suitable solutions and I am looking forward to more interesting discussions. People are now starting to use the features OSGi is offering this will drive more, even better solutions, we will need for a broader adoption. Security is crucial and when we are finally starting to deploy multiple applications side by side in one OSGi container, we can’t longer assume that everyone is playing nice. We have to enforce security, that’s what we owe our customers/users. If you hadn’t time to talk to me during the conference or didn’t have the chance to attend the event and are also involved with similar problems I am more than happy to get in contact with you. Just drop me a mail. I think the more input we can get the better the solutions are, we can come up with. Of course, I’ll keep you posted how things develop along the way.

Till then - cheers,
Mirko

This time it’ll be a very short post I just want to support my favorite Webbrowser, which I use for years now and which has become my first program I usually install on a new computer. I hope this way I can give something back to the community.

The firefox team is currently trying to get a Guinness World Record by the most downloads within one day. To accomplish this, they created a website collecting potential downloaders and coordinating the event. If you’re a supporter of firefox (or wanna to become on) and want to give something back (besides being part of a world record) you might consider registering. Of course giving away your e-mail-address credentials is always something that concerns me, but I actually trust these guys and just hope they are not doing anything stupid with my data.

Besides being part of the effort, I think the latest version of Firefox sports a lot of cool new features, which are just worth checking out. Even the latest beta of Firefox 3 is already great and you might wonna have a look at the features it already provides. As far as I can tell, this version is already stable enough to give it a test drive. So give it a shoot and check it out!

Cheers,
Mirko

Two weeks ago I received great news. The proposal I committed with my fellow coworkers (Boris Terzic and Markus Gumbel) got accepted at the OSGi community event, so I hope I’ll see some of you I only met virtually till now. Concerning the topic - I think it’ll be interesting for all of you working or at least intending to work with security and OSGi. Now, after I am allowed to talk about it, I will be able to share some of the experiences we gained.

In the talk titled “Do not disturb my circles! Secure Application Isolation with OSGi”[1], Markus Gumbel[2], and I are going to talk about how to isolate several application domains within one JVM - based on OSGi mechanisms. No big deal, some of you might say, but depending on your requirements, it actually might become a big deal or even serious issue. In our very case, we will face a Common Criteria(CC)[3], evaluation for our JVM based components ([4], gives a nice introduction on this topic - unfortunately only in German). But first things first…

InterComponentWare AG (ICW)[5],, the company I am working for right now, is one of the (if not the) leading eHealth provider in the business, with a wide ranging product portfolio. The core product is called LifeSensor[6],, which is an electronic health record like Google[7], and Microsoft[8], introduced recently in their first versions. If you, like me, are a little paranoid about privacy issues, I can recommend you “our” service for sure. We take security pretty serious and have a whole department dedicated to this. Medical data are always a big issue. Consider your CreditCard data is lost, you can get reimbursed from your CreditCard company, once the access to your medical data is compromised, it can’t be undone. Pretty serious from my point of view! Anyway, this is actually not where I am aiming at. We (and my group in particular) are involved in the implementation of the German Telematic Infrastructure project specified by the Gematik[9], and commissioned by the German government.

In our talk, we will take the “Konnektor” we are developing as the sample application to illustrate the usage of the OSGi security features. The Konnektor (we use the Cisco AXP platform[10], underneath) is the key device deployed at every medical practice and pharmacy. It is responsible for creating secure connections to the telematic infrastructure back end, as well as other security relevant tasks like reading eHealthCards, signing prescriptions or uploading emergency data on the electronicHealthCards for instance. [11], gives a nice overview, how things are done in more detail. Additionally the specification allows to have third party applications to be deployed on the connector as well, to extend its functionality. A concrete example would be the integration of the LifeSenor mentioned above to directly upload your X-Ray images to your eHealthRecord. You might understand, that security plays a very important role in such a scenario.

The key problem we are faced with is that the functionality of the Konnektor has to be certified according to the CC, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Well, certifying software in general is not easy, especially if you are talking about security and something as complex as we have. The real problem in our case however is not certifying that the software does exactly the stuff specified - no more, no less -, but also allowing third party “plug-ins” to extend its features without compromising its certified functionality or the security of the whole system. In a simple scenario, a doctor uploads a new “feature” from a malicious source to the Konnektor and we have to ensure beforehand that nothing serious can happen - tough one! Well, of course, we not only found a way, but also found a way using OSGi’s security features to do the trick even within the same JVM. The Konnektor and potentially dangerous third party extensions running side by side in the same JVM (of course, without restarting - there is a reason why we are using OSGi!).

Like every other cutting edge software project, we also found ourselves struggling with various problems no one has experience before and so I am pretty sure, we can contribute some important insights in the domain of secure OSGi application development. I hope this will be as interesting for you as it is for me to work on this topic. It is really something you can’t find a lot published about, if someone has done something similar or knows about something, I would be happy to hear about it!

Although, the sample we chose is pretty unique domain wise, the basic techniques we will present are applicable in many different domains as well (banking, insurance, development, personal live style,…). Just think of your Eclipse installation. Right now, you install your plug-ins without a SecurityManager and hope that the plug-in only does what it is supposed to do… What if it doesn’t - or better doesn’t intend to play by the rules? I can see OSGi frameworks running as general platforms combining various different application in one JVM in the furture - a kind of a meta Operating System. As soon as this vision becomes reality, I don’t want applications being able to communicate without restrictions with each other. My health insurance provider together with my personal medical record manager in one container… you never know what an insurer might do, when they get a hold of your sensitive medical records. At least I certainly don’t want to try this out!

I realize that parts of this post might sound like a commercial. If so, this is certainly not intended, but I felt the need to explain in more detail than I will be able at the talk, why we did what we did and why this is so important. In the talk, we will stick to the technology only and avoid as much as possible any relation to a concrete product - I really hate talks pretending to point out new technologies or lessons learned, but actually trying to sell a product instead, so you’re safe here for sure!

For those of you attending the conference, don’t hesitate to talk to me, if you have any questions or just say hello. I was and certainly am a big fan of technical discussions. All of you who won’t be able to attend the event and interested in the topic, don’t worry, after the talk, I am certainly blogging more about this topic in the near future Till then, stay tuned!

Cheers,
Mirko

UPDATE: the slides can be downloaded from the OSGi Website for everyone interested (pdf)

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[1] http://www.osgi.org/CommunityEvent/Program
[2] http://www.osgi.org/CommunityEvent/Speakers#MG
[3] http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org
[4] http://www.bsi.bund.de/cc/
[5] http://www.icw-global.com
[6] https://www.lifesensor.com
[7] http://www.google.com/health
[8] http://www.healthvault.com
[9] http://www.gematik.de
[10] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/routers/ps9701/axp_promo.html
[11] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps9701/data_sheet_c02_459078.html