Author: Pasquale Nieddu, Siemens
Ten years ago, Siemens together with other tech leaders like Toshiba, Hitachi, and Plat’Home decided to establish the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) to overcome the longevity gap between IT and OT. This union of companies wanted to give a rolling 10-year promise of stability and was therefore ready to trade competition for collaboration.
The founders of the CIP project — and later joined by members Renesas Electronics, Texas Instruments, Codethink, and Moxa — aimed to provide an implementation for safety-critical systems based on well-established Linux components and deliver long-term support for the kernel and a base set of packages. Only collaboration between companies with know-how, experts, and the necessary budget can realize such ambitious goals. Therefore, the CIP project contributes directly to upstream projects, giving back to the community it builds on.
At Siemens our experts are actively involved to ensure that the requirements are integrated and bugs are closed in the upstream projects that are crucial – not only for the CIP project, but also to benefit the whole open source community.
But why is it so crucial for Siemens to have such a platform? A bug on a brake control system, a power grid controller, or in industrial automation could cause severe harm to people’s lives. Therefore, the goal is to have a base layer of trusted software that serves as a reliable foundation for a decade or even longer.
The Pillars of Success
To create an Open Source Base Layer (OSBL) that can be labeled ‘industrial grade’, the CIP partners decided to take the existing Long Term Support (LTS) Kernel and extend its maintenance cycles to a breathtaking ten years—the so-called Super Long Term Support (SLTS).
But a Kernel alone is not enough. To build a reproducible and working image, you need a stable set of packages, which are managed and maintained within the CIP Core Layer. This foundation is used inside Siemens as a base to provide secure and robust software update support for many products. It can be built with the amazing tool Isar – a powerful toolset to create Debian-based images from scratch. While Isar as a project stands on its own, Siemens is one of the core contributors and we take care that it keeps pace with the challenges of our time.
Security, Compliance and a Birthday Present
Nowadays, stability is only half the battle. This is where the Security Working Group (SWG), where Siemens also is active, comes into play. Its members provide the tools to meet the IEC 62443-4-2 standard. By providing the right configurations, an image built with CIP is “IEC 62443-4-2 ready.” And just in time for the 10th anniversary – as a birthday present, so to speak – the CIP achieved official certification for the IEC 62443-4-2 standard! One of Siemens Mobility’s very own products, the so called M-COM, was the technical hardware base for this certification.
Since security is a core part of being resilient, the European Union now requires proof through the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The CIP directly helps Siemens fulfill our duty to provide security updates throughout the entire product lifecycle. This allows our members to stay ahead of threats without monitoring thousands of packages individually — shifting the focus from struggling with compliance to leading the market.
Putting Vision into Practice: Siemens Mobility
But where inside Siemens do we use it? One mentionable example is Siemens Mobility, where the CIP project together with Isar serve as the foundation for a hardened, long-supported in-house Linux Operating System. A secure, robust operating system is essential for the challenges of modern railway infrastructure such as the European Train Control System (ETCS), digital interlocking, or future cloud solutions. Thanks to the great cooperation within the CIP project, we can fulfill our customers’ high demands on safety and security standards in Europe and around the world.
For Siemens, this collaboration with the CIP project is a big plus as it significantly reduces the time and costs associated with certification. While the CIP provides the tools for IEC 62443-4-2 at Security Level 2 (SL-2), Siemens Mobility leverages this base to fulfill even more comprehensive requirements, reaching SL-3 for both component (4-2) and system levels (3-3).
Beyond using the platform, Siemens actively contributes to the CIP project’s ecosystem with its own projects. A mentionable example is the debsbom tool, which simplifies the creation and management of Software Bills of Materials (SBOM). By contributing to this and many other tools, Siemens is making it easier to meet the CIP project’s modern requirements.
Nevertheless, we must not forget that all of this was only possible because several market players agreed to work together as equals. They gave their employees the freedom to work on this shared project, and over time, the boundaries blurred: the employees of other companies truly became our colleagues.
