Biblio

Embedded virtualization has emerged as a valuable way to reduce costs, improve software quality, and decrease design time. Additionally, virtualization can enforce the overall system's security from several perspectives. One is security due to separation, where the hypervisor ensures that one domain does not compromise the execution of other domains. At the same time, the advances in the development of IoT applications opened discussions about the security flaws that were introduced by IoT devices. In a few years, billions of these devices will be connected to the cloud exchanging information. This is an opportunity for hackers to exploit their vulnerabilities, endangering applications connected to such devices. At this point, it is inevitable to consider virtualization as a possible approach for IoT security. In this paper we discuss how embedded virtualization could take place on IoT devices as a sound solution for security.

Embedded virtualization has emerged as a valuable way to increase security, reduce costs, improve software quality and decrease design time. The late adoption of hardware-assisted virtualization in embedded processors induced the development of hypervisors primarily based on para-virtualization. Recently, embedded processor designers developed virtualization extensions for their processor architectures similar to those adopted in cloud computing years ago. Now, the hypervisors are migrating to a mixed approach, where basic operating system functionalities take advantage of full-virtualization and advanced functionalities such as inter-domain communication remain para-virtualized. In this paper, we discuss the key features for embedded virtualization. We show how our embedded hypervisor was designed to support these features, taking advantage of the hardware-assisted virtualization available to the MIPS family of processors. Different aspects of our hypervisor are evaluated and compared to other similar approaches. A hardware platform was used to run benchmarks on virtualized instances of both Linux and a RTOS for performance analysis. Finally, the results obtained show that our hypervisor can be applied as a sound solution for the IoT.