Xen Summit 2026

Industry 4.0 and OT/IT convergence are consolidating industrial systems onto single-SoC multicore platforms that combine real-time control, safety monitoring, HMI, and cloud connectivity. This cuts cost and complexity, but sharing hardware between trusted and untrusted software makes cybersecurity isolation the central challenge: a compromise of one component must not open a path into another. IEC 61508 requires freedom from interference (FFI), yet on a connected platform that guarantee holds only if the isolation layer is secure first. This presentation shows how the Xen hypervisor meets the challenge—using its Type-1 architecture, strong VM isolation, and Flask/XSM framework to separate safety-critical workloads from less-trusted components. Built under a secure development lifecycle aligned with IEC 62443-4-1 and mapped to the 4-2 component requirements at Security Level 4 (SL 4), the same isolation that satisfies IEC 62443 underpins the IEC 61508 FFI argument—keeping safety and security separately evaluated on a shared mechanism. The talk also maps IEC 62443 requirements to the EU Cyber Resilience Act.