Green Hills enhances secure networking platform

A Green Hills Software product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 28, 2009

Green Hills Software has added secure virtualisation and new reference platforms to its Platform for Secure Networking.

Green Hills's approach to system virtualisation enables a complete Linux operating system and its applications ecosystem to securely and seamlessly co-exist with the performance, reliability-critical and real-time portions of networking devices - all on a single general-purpose microprocessor.

System availability is increased by eliminating the possibility for a non-critical application failure or corruption in the Linux environment to compromise the critical real-time packet traffic applications and services running on the Integrity RTOS.

Integrity, a Common Criteria EAL6+ certified operating system technology, assures high availability and secure isolation between networking subsystems.

The Integrity advanced-security architecture prevents denial-of-service attacks while guaranteeing optimal real-time performance for packet processing applications.

At the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2009, Green Hills Software will demonstrate the application of its Platform for Secure Networking to a new reference design: the Fulcrum Microsystems Vegas 48-port 1Gbit Ethernet switch chip reference system.

The Vegas reference platform consists of the Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking, including GateD - a solution for commercial-grade routing and switching software.

Using Green Hills's secure virtualisation architecture, a standard Linux operating system will execute on the Freescale MPC8548 general-purpose processor of the reference platform, providing system management functionality and other services.

Green Hills's Integrity RTOS provides the secure isolation of the Linux environment from the real-time routing and packet processing functions, which execute as native Integrity applications on the same general-purpose processor.

Integrity RTOS's ultra-fast interprocess communications (IPC) enable the Linux and Integrity applications to rapidly exchange management information.