Securing embedded and IoT systems with SPMP-based virtualization

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices, typically based on low-cost microcontrollers (MCUs), are being deployed on a massive scale while becoming increasingly complex. Virtualization is the de facto solution to secure these systems, but it has not been available on MCUs until now. This paper proposes a virtualization-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) architecture leveraging the RISC-V Hypervisor and SPMP extensions. We have implemented a working prototype running the open-source Bao Hypervisor on top of Beyond’s BA51 CPU.