New Security Features Make Moxa's UC-7400 Suitable for Industrial Gateway Applications
New Security Features Make Moxa's UC-7400 Suitable for Industrial Gateway Applications
The release
of firmware Ver. 1.5 for Moxa
Technologies' UC-7400 series of embedded computers adds new security features that
make UC-7400 suitable as a secure communication
gateway. Of particular importance are the IPTables
and OpenVPN features, which allow network administrators
to set up a firewall, and create a virtual private
network over the Internet. This development should
come as welcome news to network administrators
responsible for managing factory floor and other
types of industrial LANs that are connected to
the Internet.
IPTables plays the role of gatekeeper by providing network
administrators with a straightforward means of setting up firewalls,
and the ability to filter out packets sent from specific IP addresses.
Another important feature is NAT (Network Address Translation), which
is used either to hide the IP addresses of hosts attached to the
private LAN, or share a small number of public IPs with a large number
of private hosts. For example, most private LANs use private IP
addresses of the form 192.168.xxx.xxx. NAT can be configured to allow
all of these hosts to access the Internet by sharing one or more public
IP addresses. Open VPN is essentially a private LAN extender that
provides data encryption with DES, 3DES, and AEC, and requires
authorization by members of the VPN.
By adding this capability, Moxa has turned UC-7400 into an
economical and easy to use Internet gateway that is suitable for
industrial networking applications. All of the new features will be
available starting at the beginning of June in Ver. 1.5 of the
firmware, which can be downloaded from the Moxa Group website at www.moxa.com.
Additional features available with the new firmware include cardbus
support for 802.11g wireless LANs, which provides a connection speed of
up to 54 Mbps. In addition, the new USB Flash Disk support can combine
with UC-7400's CF storage capability to give users greater flexibility
for data storage. The PnP (Plug and Play) design of UC-7400's USB host
driver makes it easy for users to store and retrieve data from the USB
flash disk.
The remaining two features are a new Watch
Dog Timer API and a Windows Tool Chain, included for the benefit of UC
programmers. Since the vast majority of UC applications require
uninterrupted service, a new Watch Dog Timer (WDT) API was added.
Programmers can call the WDT API from their own application program to
create an automatic reboot capability. In this way, when the
application program encounters unexpected errors UC-7420 can reboot
automatically to provide uninterrupted service. The Windows Tool Chain
is a useful tool for programmers who develop applications for UC-7400
on a Windows platform. The Tool Chain simulates UC-7400's Linux root
file system on a Windows PC, making it unnecessary to set up a separate
Linux environment for application development.