OKL4 and Android: are the pieces slotting into place?

Posted by Ken Y-N on October 2nd, 2008 at 01:12pm

As someone whose particular interest in the Trusted Computing world is the mobile sphere, I found this story a sign of what may come – I remember the rumours about a TPM in the iPhone, so how long before we see a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in an Android phone, either the rumour or the realisation?

Open Kernel Labs recently made a press release to announce that their OKL4 embedded hypervisior is being utilised in the very first Google Android-based mobile phone from HTC Corp and offered by T-Mobile. (OKL4 can also be found in Sony-Ericsson’s XPERIA smartphone)

The processor at the heart of the Dream phone (or the G1, as it is now known) is a Qualcomm MSM7201A, a dual-core ARM-based device with hardware acceleration for multimedia and 3D graphics, and an integrated 3G baseband processor.

The ARM processor has TrustZone, which is sufficient to implement a trusted execution environment, in which an MTM (Mobile Trusted Module, the mobile version of the TPM specification) can be implemented, but although ARM is a member of the Trusted Computing Group, neither HTC nor Google is. Yet?

Read the full press release on BusinessWire here.

Tags: android, google, htc, okl4, open kernel labs

Under MTM Tags: android, google, htc, okl4, open kernel labs