ARM-based IoT Designs Now Gain Product Security Aid: Lynx Software Technologies

By CIOReview | Wednesday, March 4, 2015

FREMONT, CA: Lynx Software Technologies, a provider of real-time security technologies has announced that the company is moving its LynxOS 7.0 RTOS and its LynxSecure separation kernel hypervisor to the latest ARM-based processors.

The security offered by these products helps to protect the ARM-based embedded designs that include industrial control, factory automation, connected automotive, smart energy, medical and transportation.

LynxOS 7.0 is a unique RTOS product as it provides the ability for developers to embed military-grade security directly into their devices by utilizing features such as access control lists, audit, quotas, local trusted path, account management, and OpenPAM. These capabilities mean that security can be designed into a connected embedded device rather than being added as an afterthought, and hence IoT edge and gateway devices can be deemed 'secure by design'.

The LynxSecure separation kernel hypervisor brings in security qualities to developers of embedded and enterprise systems. The separation kernel provides strict isolation on a single hardware platform, efficiently separates memory, CPU and devices without the need of a "helper" operating system that is commonly found in hypervisors.

The virtualization technology in LynxSecure sits above the separation kernel, and by using hardware virtualization features found in many of the newest ARM cores, can provide performance very close to the native speeds for guest operating systems running in the isolated domains. LynxSecure can be used to securely separate different networks, for example IT and OT networks commonly found in IoT gateways, and it can securely partition persistent storage to isolate critical information from malicious threats.