PSA architecture
The British semiconductor firm ARM has unveiled PSA, a new system architecture designed to help secure and protect IoT devices.
The new Platform Security Architecture (PSA) act as a framework for developers, hardware, and silicon providers to enhance the security of IoT devices built on system-on-a-chip (SoC) Arm Cortex processors.
Last year, ARM and SoftBank predicted a trillion connected devices could be in play by 2035. These devices will require protection at both network, and hardware level to prevent them from Mirai botnet. This is where PSA comes in.
ARM shipped roughly 200 billion chips by 2021. The company 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. 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.
PSA will also surround threat models and security analysis supports ARM RTOS and even ARM Mbed OS.
Trusted Firmware-M
To encourage the rapid adoption of PSA, Arm also plans to push forward open-source reference implementation firmware called Trusted Firmware-M. The firmware supports the PSA specification. Trusted Firmware-M will target ARMv8-M systems, to begin with, before the code released to the open-source community in 2018.
The new architecture represents a “fundamental shift” in the economics of IoT security, and introducing a set of ground rules, developers and vendors alike will be able to reduce the cost, time, and risk associated with today’s IoT security.
With its specifications, PSA released in Q1 2018. ARM has also announced ARM TrustZone CryptoIsland, a new product range of security subsystems on-die and at the smartcard level designed for apps which need high levels of security, such as LPWA communication and storage. Also, the new ARM CoreSight SDC-600 Secure Debug Channel, used for debugging.
More information: [ARM]
