EW2017 - High-End Security Features for Low-End Microcontrollers

This paper and presentation was presented in MILS workshop during Embedded World 2017.

High-End Security Features for Low-End Microcontrollers - Hardware-security acceleration for multi-domain Armv8-M systems

Abstract —Arm TrustZone technology for Arm Cortex-M33 enables systems and their software to be partitioned into multiple security domains. Next generation microcontroller operating systems can benefit from these hardware security features without affecting real time performance.

This paper presents one of the possible configurations - showing how critical operating system functions can be accelerated with new hardware security features while maintaining the real-time properties of the secure OS. Critical system functions include secure memory allocation, interrupt management, whitelisting of peripheral access, cross-domain calls and secure boot.

A prototype for such an operating system – the Arm Mbed OS with uVisor - is currently being developed on GitHub to verify these concepts with practical use cases.

High-End Security Features for Low-End Microcontrollers Paper

High-End Security Features for Low-End Microcontrollers Slides