The British semiconductor firm said on Monday ahead of TechCon 2017 that
the new system, Platform Security Architecture (PSA), is intended to act as
a common industry framework for developers, hardware, and silicon providers
as a means to enhance the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices
built on system-on-a-chip (SoC) Arm Cortex processors.
The company, which expects to have shipped roughly 200 billion Arm-based chips by 2021, says that “security is no longer optional” for IoT and hopes that by introducing PSA, cost factors can be reduced and security can be implemented fully from device production to the cloud.
The PSA framework is a recipe which covers the basics for IoT security requirements. It includes threat models and security analysis, hardware and firmware architecture specifications, and firmware source code to implement better IoT security standards.
In addition, PSA provides direction for secure ways to identify devices and how to conduct secure over-the-air updates, certificate-based authentication — rather than relying on traditional passwords to secure devices — and ways to implement trusted boot sequences.
The architecture is OS agnostic and can be supported by Arm’s RTOS and software vendor partners, including Arm Mbed OS.
In order to encourage the rapid adoption of PSA, Arm also plans to push forward open-source reference implementation firmware called Trusted Firmware-M which supports the PSA specification.
Trusted Firmware-M will target Armv8-M systems, to begin with, before the code is released to the open-source community in 2018.
