As System on Chip manufacturers are continually developing TrustZone compliant devices, this technology is becoming ingrained in the embedded market. Since TrustZone only provides the hardware infrastructure foundations, allowing a designer to choose from a range of components that can fulfil specific functions within the target environment, a lot of the technology is implementation defined. This approach may hinder a system designer’s work — it impairs and makes the portability of system software (Operating Systems, Hypervisors) developed with this technology a lot more complicated since, for example, different target platforms may provide more or less options to control its memory subsystem —, as well as lead to some design idiosyncrasies that should be accounted for. As such, it is important to examine how different manufacturers choose to work with the TrustZone architecture, in order to scale back those major constraints.
- Study of the ARM TrustZone architecture, focused on the memory subsystem;
- Study of TrustZone-assisted virtualization;
- Study and evaluation of various approaches to the memory subsystem organization in TrustZone compliant platforms (from different manufacturers: Xilinx, NXP, RaspberryPi);
- Analysis of performance and security implications of the memory subsystem implementation differences in a virtualized system.