Genode with Trustzone

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Hello Vasan,

On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 03:14:24PM +0530, Vasan VS wrote:
> Hi Genodians,
> 
> I was extremely thrilled to read through the extensive documentation
> on how Genode has been experimented with Trustzone of ARM available
> at:
> 
> https://genode.org/documentation/articles/trustzone
> 
> I am very interested to know if the same has been experimented on the
> latest ARM cores/SoCs that are there in the market currently and any
> feedback on that.

It is nice to hear that our TrustZone article felt into good ground.
We did not "experimented" with TrustZone features using latest ARM
SoCs, but whenever necessary we bootstrap the CPU cores to the point,
where we can use e.g. virtualization facilities. To enter the
hypervisor mode on platforms where the bootloader left the CPU in
TrustZone's secure world, we first setup it (resp. the TrustZone
monitor), and then enter the normal world to be able to use the
virtualization facilities.

This kind of bootstrapping however is generic code and not dependent
on a specific SoC. We did not coped with any special TrustZone-aware
devices, like the i.MX-specific "Central Security Unit" described
in the mentioned article nor similar.
Although we analyzed the potential of the TrustZone mechnisms by the
described experimentsm, it is not in the main interest of the Genode
framework, because on systems that run Genode-only the protection
given by a MMU and a S-MMU are sufficient. Moreover, on most platforms
where a Genode system can be booted, the TrustZone secure world is
already occupied by some firmware, for example the ARM Trusted
Firmware, so that we do not make any use of it.

Regards
Stefan

> 
> Regards
> 
> Vasan
> 
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-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

https://github.com/skalk | https://genode.org