Expired Security Certificate Prompts Scramble To Samsung’s Smart Displays Digital Signage-Ready

October 27, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Our German language content partner Invidis has an interesting post up exploring how there was a scramble yesterday when an internal security certificate on Samsung’s Tizen OS-driven smart displays expired, potentially blocking updates from third party applications, like digital signage CMS software. The post is in German, but should auto-translate (or you can read most of it here!).

The situation created the risk that the digital signage application would no longer work..

Invidis picks it up from here ….

One of the first to spot the problem was middleware vendor SignageOS , as part of a routine QM review. Samsung was informed immediately – and the manufacturer reacted quickly.

In less than 12 hours, Samsung released a bug fix in the form of a new patch for the Tizen development environment. “It was a serious issue, but Samsung also took it very seriously,” said Stan Richter, CEO of SignageOS.

SignageOS immediately imported the bug fix into its service cloud system and tested its validity on various devices with various Tizen generations: A total of 15 different Tizen models and versions – Tizen 2.4, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and 6.5 – were tested in the laboratory Digital signage start-up from Prague supports more than 50 CMS on more than 100 SoC versions.

The updated version was then forwarded to all CMS software partners, so that there were no major service interruptions to either SignageOS or the software partners.

“The biggest challenge was to explain the basic problem (expired root certificate) to all partners quickly and in a way that was easy to understand,” summarizes Stan Richter in the invidis interview.

SignageOS got directly involved in this because its business is developing and keeping current a software bridge that makes it easy for CMS software companies to get their platforms working on smart displays, Samsung included, without needing to put in a lot of time and money to do a full integration with a native player, and then continue to support that.