Since 2020, the Dutch manufacturer Prowise has been sending its interactive, digital learning and teaching solutions through our certification process. The touchscreens, some of which are huge, have always impressed our test engineers, and not just from a security point of view – some of them could be caught, lost in thought and almost meditatively scribbling colorful images and shapes on the huge 4K IPS panel, enjoying the flawless 40-point touch support.
This year, the certification of the second generation of the Touchscreen Ten was now upon us, and once again, there was a lot of scribbling and testing going on.
We had already discussed the features and characteristics of the Prowise touchscreens extensively in a post last year. For the new generation (firmware version 1.1.1), not much has changed in the already convincing basic values. However, there are still a few differences, of course. For example, the new generation no longer ships with an Android 9, but now works with the much more up-to-date version 11 of Google’s operating system. This is another step forward for the security of the already secure Prowise solution. Furthermore, the modified, installed Android version (Prowise Central Version 4.2.1) is also consistently protected against unauthorized access from the outside – the installation of applications from sources other than Prowise’s own app store is virtually ruled out and an exploitation of other access options, such as ADB, is also not possible. Really frustrating for the tester, but of course excellent for security.
In all other respects, the Prowise solution is still convincing in the new generation: We have analyzed the new versions of the companion apps, Presenter 10 (v1.7.3) and Reflect (v9.0), statically and dynamically and can only praise here as well. Both apps achieve security scores in the static analysis that we rarely see. The versions of the Internet browsers Firefox and Chrome, which can be installed via the Prowise App Store, are not specifically up-to-date (Chrome in version 104; Firefox in version 103), but at least no relevant vulnerabilities are known for the provided versions. The communication of the device itself and the associated applications is always adequately secured, and all standard attacks carried out in the tests, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, came to nothing.
In terms of data protection and user privacy, the Prowise solutions have been exemplary in our tests right from the start, and the tests this year also give no reason to assume anything else.
All in all, the second generation of the Prowise Touchscreen Ten passes all relevant areas of our certification tests without any difficulties worth mentioning. Accordingly, we gladly award our certificate “Approved IoT Product” for another year.