Hardening IoMT Medical Devices: Defense‑in‑Depth on Yocto‑Based Embedded Linux

Connected medical devices (IoMT) increasingly depend on Yocto‑based Embedded Linux platforms to perform critical, patient‑impacting functions. As cyberattacks on healthcare rise, securing these devices is now central to patient safety, regulatory compliance, and lifecycle quality. This session provides a practical, defense‑in‑depth blueprint for hardening IoMT devices—starting from secure boot and measured trust to OS‑level hardening, system integrity, secure OTA updates, sandboxing, runtime protection, and zero‑trust device‑to‑cloud communication.
We will map real‑world cyber trends to specific embedded mitigations and align them with global regulatory expectations for medical devices. The session also demonstrates how open‑source tools within the Yocto ecosystem can enforce reproducible security controls, generate SBOMs, and support automated vulnerability triage throughout the device lifecycle.
Attendees will gain engineering‑ready patterns to build secure, maintainable Linux‑based devices—applicable not only in healthcare, but also industrial IoT, automotive, and safety‑critical embedded domains.