News & Press

Green Hills Software Announces INTEGRITY Multivisor for Trusted Mobile Devices Version 4

Advances include breakthrough 3D graphics and ARM VE virtualization

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SANTA BARBARA, CA — March 11, 2013 — Green Hills Software, the largest independent supplier of embedded and mobile virtualization solutions, today announced a major new release of its INTEGRITY® Multivisor for Trusted Mobile Devices. For the first time, enterprise and government mobile device users and administrators can take advantage of off-the-shelf mobile phones and tablets for both personal and business use, with both parties having complete confidence in security and privacy. Shipping since 2003, INTEGRITY Multivisor is the only virtualization solution built upon security certified separation kernel technology that provides highly assured isolation between personas while also providing a native open standard execution environment for security-critical tasks.

"Green Hills Software brings its 30+ years successful track record for deploying trusted and certified software solutions for mission-critical electronics to the mobile market," commented Chris Rommel, vice president of M2M & Embedded Technology at VDC. "This latest release of INTEGRITY Multivisor firmly places the company at the forefront of mobile virtualization and secure dual-persona technology."

Key capabilities of Multivisor v4 for Mobile include:

• Hardware accelerated 3D graphics concurrently shared between all Android personas
• Virtual Self-Encrypting Drive (vSED) for hypervisor-protected user authentication and data-at-rest protection
• VPN for hypervisor-protected data-in-transit protection
• Green Hills Software's FIPS 140-2 and NSA Suite B cryptographic library
• Hardware enabled virtualization using ARM Virtualization Extensions (ARM VE)
• Multicore SMP support
• Complete suite of virtualized and securely shared I/O, including Bluetooth, USB, cellular voice and data, audio, hardware-accelerated graphics, touch screen/buttons, Wi-Fi, sensors, and GPS
• Secure boot
• Virtualization supports the latest Android Jelly Bean versions

Multivisor Security
In addition to the isolation provided by its separation kernel, built-in security components of INTEGRITY Multivisor render common attacks impossible, including stealing encryption keys, key logging, and screen scraping. Yet, the security capabilities execute without the knowledge of the virtualized Android guest operating systems and without impacting user experience.

ARM VE
Historically, heavy guest kernel paravirtualization was required to achieve acceptable virtualization performance in mobile devices. These modifications are not only intrusive to the OEM development process, but they also slow time-to-market and result in a less maintainable and error-prone solution. ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension (ARM VE) is a world-class implementation for virtualization acceleration and hypervisor management. INTEGRITY Multivisor support for ARM VE was first demonstrated in commercial devices at the 2013 CES and is based upon Green Hills Software's extensive experience in virtualization hardware that has been applied to the Intel (2005) and Power Architectures (2008).

Time-to-Market
Industry observers acknowledge that Type 1 hypervisors like the INTEGRITY Multivisor possess the necessary software foundation to achieve a far higher level of robustness and security than is possible with Type 2 hypervisors and OS virtualization/containers. However, because the Type 1 hypervisor runs on bare metal, it must be ported. INTEGRITY Multivisor for Trusted Mobile Devices eliminates the traditional development time and cost tradeoff of the Type 1 approach because it leverages the INTEGRITY separation kernel that is already widely, rapidly, and continuously ported across processors as a real-time kernel for embedded systems. In addition, the INTEGRITY Multivisor for Trusted Mobile Devices v4 employs an I/O management infrastructure for secure sharing of the full suite of mobile and automotive device peripherals without requiring special assistance from device manufacturers. INTEGRITY Multivisor can be ported to a new mobile device using a supported chipset and Android release in weeks.

"As has already transpired in the cloud, the hypervisor is quickly supplanting the operating system as the software foundation for sophisticated consumer electronics," commented David Kleidermacher, chief technology officer, Green Hills Software. "INTEGRITY Multivisor is the ideal hypervisor for mobile, enabling the vision of secure, dual-mode personal/business use and reduced total cost of ownership that is simply impossible with a mobile OS by itself."

About INTEGRITY Multivisor
INTEGRITY Multivisor is a member of the family of INTEGRITY Secure Virtualization (ISV) solutions. Multivisor consists of the certified INTEGRITY real-time microkernel technology coupled with facilities to execute one or more "guest" operating systems. INTEGRITY Multivisor also provides a native, open standards-based environment for critical applications, such as security functionality and fast-boot real-time applications. INTEGRITY Multivisor offers several approaches to virtualization in ARM-powered devices, including paravirtualization, and full virtualization with or without hardware hypervisor acceleration. As the digital world grows in complexity, no single operating system suffices. The hypervisor provides the right level of abstraction — the virtual machine — for flexibility, scalability, and portability, enabling elegant yet practical solutions to previously intractable computing problems.

Availability
INTEGRITY Multivisor for Trusted Mobile Devices has been shipping in commercial smartphones and tablets since 2012. Version 4 is available today.

About Green Hills Software

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the largest independent vendor of embedded development solutions. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178B RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL 6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the military/avionics, medical, industrial, automotive, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software at www.ghs.com.

Green Hills, the Green Hills logo, INTEGRITY and Multivisor are trademarks or registered trademarks of Green Hills Software, in the U.S. and/or internationally. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.