Imagination Technologies has launched OmniShield, designed to provide scalable and secure protection of next generation SoCs. The approach is described as a scalable security technology that ensures that applications which need to be secure are isolated from each other effectively and reliably as well as protected from non secure applications. Multiple secure domains are created in which each secure/non secure application/operating system can operate independently in its own separate environment.
Tony King-Smith, Imagination's executive vp of marketing, said: "OmniShield will play a critical role in minimising the attack surface area in next generation connected devices. PowerVR IP is already used in secure heterogeneous environments, thanks to the virtualisation in some Series6XT GPUs. We'll soon see OmniShield ready systems based on our other processors. This is the start of a new era of secure SoC and cloud based systems design."
The multidomain separation based approach is said to not only ensure security and reliability, but also to ease development and deployment of applications and services. It also addresses scalability; in a heterogeneous architecture, application data and resources will be shared between the CPU and other processors in the system.
Imagination is building OmniShield support into all of its processors. In addition, Imagination and its partners will provide virtualised root of trust IP blocks for OmniShield, including crypto, Public Key Accelerator, true random number generators, secure I/O for external TPMs and secure ROM.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk