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Architecting a more Secure world with isolation and virtualizationarm Blogs - Berenice Mann, ArmAug. 06, 2018 |
New Secure world architecture in Armv8.4
Arm TrustZone was introduced to the Arm architecture A-profile in 2003. At the heart of the TrustZone approach is the concept of Secure and Normal worlds that are hardware separated. Secure hardware resources are only accessible by the software running in the Secure world. Software in the Normal world is blocked by the hardware from accessing these resources. This concept of Secure (trusted) and Normal (non-trusted) worlds extends beyond the processor, to encompass memory, software, bus transactions, interrupts and peripherals within a System on a Chip (SoC).
The introduction of TrustZone has paved the way for an ecosystem of trusted operating systems (OS) vendors. Initially, trusted OSs provided basic device security services, such as trusted boot, or handling of platform secrets. Today, trusted OSs have evolved to support bespoke applications that might be used in a variety of security use cases, such as secure payment or media protection.