After around ten years of development work, the Austrian technology company Muse Electronics recently launched the “world’s most secure tablet”, the Backbone.
What do you do when you want a product to meet the highest safety requirements? “You keep developing it until you have achieved your goal!” Philipp Lechner smiles. The Managing Director of the Viennese company Muse Electronics has many years of experience in business development for defence and security manufacturers and is therefore aware of the high demands that the military and security organizations place on products – and this applies to heavy equipment as well as supposedly incidental items such as the backbone tablet developed by his company.
“A tablet is much more for a soldier than it is for us at home on the living room couch.”
Backbone-Chef Philipp Lechner
However, Lechner doesn’t want to leave the word “incidentals” standing: “A tablet is much more for a soldier than it is for us at home on the living room couch.” Yes, the Backbone can also be used to take photos and send emails. But much more importantly, the tablet can be used to share and edit situation reports, retrieve critical information and create, receive and process many other data and messages that are essential for the success of missions. Or to put it another way: without Backbone, even the heavy equipment for soldiers would only be worth half as much.
Back to the topic of security, which was the main reason for the above-average development time of ten years. “However, this time was necessary in order to actually close all security gaps without compromise and bring the world’s most secure tablet onto the market,” says Lechner in an interview with Militär Aktuell. The backbone of the security concept is a completely rethought system architecture. What other manufacturers solve with software, Backbone does at hardware level. External and individually configurable boot media serve as both memory and key. This allows access to security-critical functions such as camera, microphone, GPS, WLAN or Bluetooth to be activated and deactivated – admittedly only after cryptographic authentication. But also access to stored data. All domain-related data is processed and stored automatically and exclusively on the connected boot medium. https://militaeraktuell.at/wir-schreiben-gerade-geschichte/ Lechner: “Our patented solution therefore enables full control over data from different security domains. Potential sources of error and risks of misuse are reduced to a minimum at hardware level. This demonstrably prevents unauthorized access to deactivated modules. For the first time, it is also possible to simultaneously edit and store data from several security domains physically separated on one tablet.” Postscript: “If the system detects a tampering attempt or damage, Backbone automatically triggers security routines. This prevents the loss of mission-critical data.” But that’s not all, Lechner and his team have also given the device an ultra-rugged casing: The tablet is completely waterproof , dust-proof, scratch-proof, cold-proof and heat-proof. Lechner concludes: “Backbone’s patented system architecture eliminates errors that can occur in stressful situations. That’s what makes Backbone so unique.”
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