Microcontrollers

Microcontrollers are at the heart of many embedded devices including IoT and automotive. Microcontrollers are responsible for the core functionality of these systems and ensuring secure operation is critical to their security. Many security issues can arise, including:

• Memory Protections Units: Memory Protection Units (MPUs) are hardware elements that ensure proper isolation of secure and non secure data in microcontrollers. Radix can help ensure these are configured properly is critical for system security
• Configuration Status Registers: Configuration Status Registers (CSRs) are used to configure various different functionality for the microcontroller, including enabling external access, secure execution modes, and access control to other parts of the system. Radix can ensure that CSRs cannot be overwritten to change system configurations or read to leak secret information.

• Trusted Execution Environments: Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are software packages that leverage hardware features to ensure isolation between secure and non-secure worlds of execution. Examples include Arm TrustZone and Synopsys’ ARC SecureShield. Ensuring proper configuration of hardware security features by the TEE is critical for the microcontroller to provide proper system security. Radix is effective at ensuring secure information does not get observed by the insecure world configured by a TEE.
• Physical Side Channels: Physical side channels (power, electromagnetic radiation, or other physical leakages) can be exploited to extract proprietary information or to change the behavior of the microcontroller. Ensuring proper protection and analysis of physical side channels is critical to ensure microcontrollers are protected against an adversary with local access to the system.