May 21, 2015 – Imagination Technologies introduces OmniShield, designed to provide scalable and secure solutions for protection of next-generation SoCs. With OmniShield-ready hardware and software IP, SoCs and OEM products can be designed for security, reliability and dynamic software management, as use models and services evolve across a wide range of connected devices.
Today’s embedded security approaches are CPU centric, binary (one secure zone / one non-secure zone) and are complicated to implement. These solutions won’t scale to address the sophisticated types of applications and services being enabled by next-generation connected devices and the cloud.
OmniShield is a scalable security technology that ensures that applications that need to be secure are effectively and reliably isolated from each other as well as protected from non-secure applications, while still meeting required levels of functionality, performance, cost, and power consumption. OmniShield goes beyond a binary approach to create multiple secure domains, where each secure/non-secure application/operating system can operate independently in its own separate environment. For example, secure processes such as DRM and payment systems can coexist with non-secure processes such as gaming and web browsing.
This multi-domain separation-based architecture not only ensures security and reliability, but also eases development and deployment of applications and services. Thanks to OmniShield, developers will be able to securely develop and debug code in a virtualized environment, and operators and other service providers can configure devices for provisioning of services in the field.
OmniShield also addresses the scalability that heterogeneous architectures will require by protecting all of the processors in an SoC – including the CPU, GPU and others. In a heterogeneous architecture, application data and resources will be shared between the CPU and other processors in the system, so those processors will now face the same level of exposure as the CPU, and must be given the same level of protection.
OmniShield encompasses both hardware and software components, enabling companies for the first time to implement a truly secure, heterogeneous multi-domain application environment using hardware-enforced separation and protection throughout. Because it is based on hardware supported virtualization, OmniShield is efficient and does not compromise performance, which is especially important in embedded environments such as IoT.
OmniShield leverages the fact that hardware virtualization is applicable to all processing engines including general processors (CPUs) and application specific processors such as GPUs. In addition, since virtualization concepts are already well understood and supported techniques in many operating systems and RTOS, they provide an ideal and proven foundation for hardware enablement and extensions needed for next-generation security. These facts mean that OmniShield can offer a universal security solution that delivers the ultimate combination of protection, scalability and efficiency.