RISC-V security: First piece of the puzzle falls into place

By Thomas Claburn

10 Sep 2018 at 20:08

Credits: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/10/sifive_hex_five_riscv_secure_environment/

If you’ve been looking at SiFive‘s RISC-V-based chip technology and thinking, y’know what, it’s missing an Arm TrustZone-style element to run sensitive code, well, here’s some good news.

And if you’re just into processor design and checking out alternatives to Arm CPU cores, then this may be some interesting news.

SiFive helps organizations turn semiconductor designs based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) into chips. On Monday, it announced it has integrated Hex Five Security’s MultiZone Security trusted execution environment (TEE) into its Freedom SDK.

The technical confection gives companies creating RISC-V chips the tools to implement a security environment comparable to ARM’s TrustZone, though perhaps without past flaws. It should help users of the SiFive toolchain bring security-enforcing silicon to market faster.

Hex Five‘s technology, as its name suggests, allows for the creation of multiple isolated zones in which sensitive code – such as secure boot procedures and cryptographic routines – can run without interference from other programs or operating systems executing at the same time. It works with a Configurator tool that combines the compiled code with a Hex Five nanokernel to run within the secured environment.

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