On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:15:03AM +0200, Norman Feske wrote:
Hi Jookia,
Hello again,
As you are repeatedly speaking of TrustZone, I assume that you are going to target ARM only?
So here's the deal with this: I'm a free software zealot so naturally I have a Novena board that I want to use for all my computing. Right now I've started porting NixOS to it given someone's porting the Nix package manager to Genode and I really like the idea of an immutable package manager that can explicitly show an application's TCB.
I'm also a big fan of Qubes and security through isolation. Unfortunately, the Novena uses the i.MX6 chipset which has an ARM Cortex-A9 CPU which means there's no capacity for hardware-based virtualization or isolation. So I'm left with three choices: Don't isolate my environment and use a single GNU/Linux desktop, try porting Qubes to LXC and have a monolithic kernel as a hypervisor, or go down the road of using the wrong tool for the job: TrustZone.
From what I know TrustZone is ideally used to host a small secure operating
system alongside a regular operating system. I'd like to be able to use the TrustZone as my normal operating system and use the normal world for untrusted hardware like network adapters or USB sticks. Combining this with L4Linux I'm hoping I'll be able to have some virtual machines spread out in a Qubes fashion with some hardware protection.
Aside from the Novena I have my current x86_64 i7 920 machine and also a laptop with an Intel Atom processor. I don't really consider these as interesting targets for development, though I wouldn't mind setting up Genode on the laptop for fun. Don't hold me to that though.
Cheers Norman
Cheers! Jookia.