ARM cores for IoT designs get Lynx hypervisor support
The development allows the military-grade security offered by these products to be applied to the protection of ARM-based embedded designs addressing IoT markets such as industrial control, factory automation, connected automotive, smart energy, medical and transportation.
LynxOS 7.0 is being migrated initially to the ARM Cortex®-A series of processor cores, including processors from Xilinx, TI and Freescale. LynxSecure is being migrated to Cortex-A family members that offer hardware virtualization support. Gurjot Singh, CEO of Lynx Software Technologies, said, “The next generation of connected embedded systems being designed using ARM-based processors will need to have enhanced security, especially when controlling critical infrastructure.” He continued, “We believe the industry-leading security technology in both our LynxOS 7.0 and LynxSecure products will offer a major leap for ARM-based developers, allowing them to design the most secure connected systems without sacrificing power, performance and functionality.”
LynxOS 7.0 provides the ability for developers to embed military-grade security directly into their devices by using features such as access control lists, audit, quotas, local trusted path, account management, and OpenPAM. The company says that security can be designed into a connected embedded device rather than being added as an afterthought, allowing IoT edge and gateway devices to be categorised as ‘secure by design’.
For developers of embedded and enterprise systems, the separation kernel provides strict isolation on a single hardware platform, and efficiently separates memory, CPU and devices without the need of a “helper” operating system that is commonly found in hypervisors. The virtualisation technology in LynxSecure sits above the separation kernel, and by using hardware virtualisation features found in many of the newest ARM cores, can provide performance very close to the native speeds for guest operating systems running in the isolated domains. LynxSecure can be used to securely separate different networks, for example IT and OT networks commonly found in IoT gateways, and it can securely partition persistent storage to isolate critical information from malicious threats.
Lynx Software Technologies is working with Xilinx to make LynxSecure available for their recently announced Zynq UltraScale Plus, with the combination of technologies bringing an ultra-secure platform for tomorrow’s advanced connected systems.
The separation kernel and “Type-0” hypervisor is a bare-metal architecture, designed from the ground up, that differentiates from type 1 hypervisors by removing the un-needed functionality from the “security sensitive” hypervisor mode, yet virtualises guest OSes in a tiny stand-alone package. LynxSecure enables one or more guest OS (real-time or GPOS) to run on embedded, desktop or server platforms, and provides a highly flexible secure real-time virtualisation solution for use in embedded and IT computer systems. Designed to maintain the highest levels of military security, LynxSecure offers a combination of security with functionality, allowing developers and integrators to use the latest software and hardware technologies to build complex OS-based systems.
LynxOS 7.0 is a deterministic, hard real-time operating system that provides POSIX conformant API’s in a small footprint embedded kernel. LynxOS provides symmetric multi-processing support to fully take advantage of multi-core/multi-threaded processors. LynxOS 7.0 provides open APIs including medium-assurance security per the general purpose operating-system protection profile (GPOSPP). Alongside the upcoming ARM support, LynxOS 7.0 currently supports the most popular reference targets in the Intel and PowerPC architectures including the new Intel 4th Generation Core, and the Freescale QorIQ processors. LynxOS 7.0 Board Support Packages are available for targets from GE Intelligent Systems, Curtiss Wright, and Extreme Engineering.
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