Q-SYS Security Overview

Let’s talk security, well software security for AV, that is.

As you might know, Q-SYS is a software-based platform that provides for audio, visual, and control processing, distribution and management .

The Q-SYS OS software stack allows us to advance Q-SYS to meet the growing feature needs of the industry,

and provide the flexibility to keep the ever-evolving security needs at the forefront of the system.

Now, we have in-depth resources available that go deep into the security methodology, but let’s start with a high-level overview of the key concepts.

Behind the scenes, we use a series of industry standards and processes across the Q-SYS Platform to strengthen and validate security.

Our baseline standard is OWASP ASVS 4.0, which provides a set of principles for secure development and testing,

focusing on identifying any vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker.

For the security-minded, you play an important part in configuring your Q-SYS system to give different types of users the appropriate level of access.

That’s because Q-SYS allows you to configure tiered user access.

Role-based access controls let you highly-customize the permissions that each user has, in order to comply with your specific security environments and best practices.

Obviously, protecting the data that's travelling on your network is always a priority.

So we based the Q-SYS encryption and cipher suite on the same technology that is used to build the worldwide web,

namely Industry standard TLS 1.3, Security Hash Algorithms, and AES encryption.

In fact, here’s a fun fact about the encryption we use and how hard it would be to break the key.

If you enlisted the entire computational power of the entire BITCOIN network and try to break this AES encryption key with brute force, it would take 70 septillion years to break it!

You never know what kind of bad actors are out there so we’ve implemented cryptographic code signing when updating your Q-SYS system.

That means that as long as your system is running Q-SYS Designer Software v9.1.0 or later, the Core will check all subsequent firmware updates for a digital signature and,

by default, will only install firmware that is signed by QSC. This protects the Core against illegitimate or unsafe firmware.

Our engineers regularly evaluate the system using a series of tests: white-box testing to identify potential source code vulnerabilities,

and black-box testing to simulate attack attempts.

We also perform full 3rd party penetration testing.

These tests give us great confidence in the resiliency of the system

and provides valuable information on infrastructure health for present and future security considerations.

And that’s just the beginning.

We’re always working to ensure that the Q-SYS OS, hardware, software applications, cloud infrastructure

and licensing technologies are continually scrutinized with security in mind.

If you’d like a deeper dive, check out our security documentation. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.