Green Hills Software enables secure virtualization for mobile ARM TrustZone technology-based devices
Posted by Courtney Howard
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., 21 Nov. 2009. Green Hills Software Inc. in Santa Barbara, Calif., is releasing its Integrity Virtualization for ARM TrustZone technology in the latest enhanced version of the company's Integrity real-time operating system (RTOS), which is certified by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to EAL6+.
Integrity Secure Virtualization (ISV) is designed to consolidate processors, improve system security and reliability, and reduce the certification burden in mission-critical applications.
ISV supports TrustZone technology-enabled ARM processor cores -- including the ARM1176JZ(F)-S, Cortex-A8, and Cortex-A9 processors -- on system-on-chip (SoC) implementations from Texas Instruments (TI), Freescale, and other semiconductor manufacturers.
"Integrity Secure Virtualization enables the deployment of trustworthy applications, such as network authentication and digital rights management, sandboxed from the general-purpose operating environment," says Gordon Jones, vice president of Green Hills Software's Embedded Virtualization Business Unit.
"Green Hills Software is a long-time leading software supplier for TI's OMAP35x customers who design a wide breadth of products ranging from medical devices to industrial automation," commented Alejandro Erives, OMAP35x marketing manager, TI. "The new hypervisor and management capability of Integrity Secure Virtualization offers our customers the confidence that their designs are built on a proven, secure and reliable platform."
Integrity Secure Virtualization consists of the certified Integrity operating system technology coupled with facilities to execute one or more "guest" operating systems on TrustZone technology-enabled SoCs.
Integrity uses its resource management and protection capabilities and the ARM memory management unit (MMU) to compartmentalize the secure zone into "metazones." This trait reduces time to certification for specialized applications, such as key management, which must share the secure zone with other critical components.
For device manufacturers who must support multiple multimedia operating systems, Integrity Secure Virtualization enables all these operating systems to run on the latest hardware without porting.
Integrity Secure Virtualization also comes with tools and a middleware ecosystem to help device manufacturers develop and deploy products faster. Integrity is supported by thousands of device drivers, network stacks, file systems, Java virtual machines, and many other components--pre-integrated and ready to deploy, says a company official.
Integrity Secure Virtualization runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms, such as the Texas Instruments OMAP 35x and Freescale i.MX515. For more information contact Green Hills Software online at www.ghs.com.
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