Secure ADAS development with LynxSecure port

John Blevins, Director of Products at Lynx Software Technologies said: “The NXP S32V is a dedicated solution for vision processing and machine learning which has been widely adopted by our automotive and industrial customers. Successful development of fully autonomous level-5 vehicles will depend not only on the performance of the processor, but also on the security and integrity of the system and the data that it uses. Lynx is proud to offer LynxSecure, the industry’s most secure real time hypervisor, on one of the leading processor platforms for ADAS and other embedded vision applications.”

Nigel Tracey, Head of RTA Solutions at ETAS, innovative embedded software solutions company for the automotive industry welcomed the announcement of the port saying: “This is a significant development. Lynx has made the industry’s most secure separation kernel hypervisor available on a leading automotive microprocessor addressing the needs of new vehicle computer and domain-controller ECUs.”

ETAS and Lynx Software Technologies have announced a collaboration to deliver safe and secure platform technology to support the needs of next-gen connected and autonomous vehicles.

Allan McAuslin, ADAS Product Line Manager, NXP added: “NXP’s S32V products are specifically architected to support the development of machine learning systems which are critical in allowing autonomous vehicles to adapt to changing environments and adverse conditions. These vehicles will need to be secure by design and we are excited to learn that Lynx has made LynxSecure accessible to developers in order to achieve this important goal. The fact that LynxSecure users were immune to Meltdown from day one bears testimony to the inherent security of their technology.”

LynxSecure is a true high assurance separation kernel virtualisation technology founded on a robust design. LynxSecure 6.0 adds support for the Armv8-A architecture to existing Intel x86 support, providing military-grade security coupled with highly efficient virtualisation to multi-core Arm SoC-based designs.

The virtualisation and hardware protection capabilities of LynxSecure offer real time performance while maintaining the highest levels of security. LynxSecure supports the 64-bit architecture of Armv8-A, and allows for both 32 and 64-bit virtualised guest OSes to run without modification.  LynxSecure fully supports multi-core Arm SoCs by offering core-to-guest OS affinity, support for multi-core guest OSes, and core sharing across multiple guest OSes, enabling developers to take full advantage of multi-core systems.

Lynx Software Technologies was able to confirm that both its ARM and Intel LynxSecure customers are protected from Meltdown, the infamous hardware vulnerability that has exposed almost every other operating system based computer system on the planet. This is due to the decentralised approach of LynxSecure, where each guest computing environment is self-sufficient.

The autonomy of each guest environment obviates the need for the kernel to provide global services. It is by the nature of the unique distributed autonomous design approach LynxSecure was immune to Meltdown, where attacker processes/VMs were able to derive kernel and guest private memory as a result of central service oriented kernel designs that required access to all guest memory.