Hardware/Software Support for Securing Virtualization in Embedded Systems

National audienceAs far as one is concerned by security in virtual embedded systems, one can say that many ideas or implementations exist today but not really as a global solution and not really in the open-source world. Our goal is to bring a security solution up-to-date and new to build-up a solution from the hardware to an end-user application located in a virtual machine (VM). The idea of this article is to focus on the lack of secure solutions that can help virtualization and communication which can be implemented on new hybrids (Core + FPGA) development platforms. On one side, these boards are featured with processors that do not have virtualization ex-tensions but are powerfull enough to really support hypervisors and their guests. On the other side some virtualization solutions presently exist for ARM processors but they only refer to TrustZone for their (hardware) security. These hybrid boards can offer us more: we have read some re-cents and up-to-date specifications made by a consortium to help the implementation of hardware security. In this area, FPGA can help in securing virtualization. But we must notice that, for now, all has been made for Intel/AMD architectures and for a lone operating system. Even so, the whole propositions are too complex to be implemented on em-bedded systems. So, we will have to use some capabilities in hardware development and make software rearrangements to help us to design a functional solution