TECOM Trusted Embedded Computing

TECOM (Trusted Embedded Computing) is a consortium research project funded in part by the Information Technology for European Advancement (ITEA2) programme.

Industrialised societies are increasingly dependent on embedded systems that are getting more and more complex, dynamic, and open, while interacting with a progressively more demanding and heterogeneous environment. As a consequence, the reliability and security of these systems have become major concerns. Unfortunately, current systems provide little or no support to determine their level of dependability and trustworthiness. An increasing number of external security attacks as well as design weaknesses in operating systems, especially in the PC world, have resulted in large economic damages, and as a consequence difficulties to attain user acceptance and getting accepted by the market.

Consequently, there is a growing request from stakeholders in embedded systems to make available execution platforms which address both integrity and security concerns. For instance

• From a security viewpoint, it is important to avoid denial of service (DOS) issues provoked by resource shortage (e.g. memory, CPU), while from an integrity viewpoint it is important to ensure availability of resource budget (e.g. memory budget, CPU budget)
• From a security viewpoint it is important to prevent malicious access to data created by another application, and from an integrity viewpoint it is important to avoid unexpected memory access due to programming errors.

The strategic objective of TECOM is to investigate solutions and architectures for embedded systems platforms which need to meet both security and integrity requirements. The TECOM approach will be to apply the concept of trusted platforms to real-time embedded systems.