Virtualization on mobile phones

Posted by Ken Y-N on July 20th, 2009 at 03:12pm

Embedded Computing recently published an article by Steve Subar of Open Kernel Labs on mobile phone virtualization. This is a subject in which I have a lot of active interest, especially in relation to the Mobile Trusted Module and its associated Multi-Stakeholder Model.

Open Kernel Labs’ OKL4 hypervisor has found its way into the two biggest (hype-wise at least!) mobile phone environments, the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android. From a trust point of view, the article states a benefit of virtualization to be:

Mobile phone virtualization [...] enhances both system reliability and trustworthiness by isolating questionable code within separate VMs run by a smaller, more manageable trusted computing base. When and if third-party code misbehaves, its impact is limited to the VM containing it. Watchdogs can restart guest environments, and trusted code can shut down or throttle offending VMs in the face of runaway execution or denial-of-service attacks.

Such isolation is essential for implementing a software trusted module on a mobile phone.

Tags: android, iphone, open kernel labs

Under MTM+ Virtualisation Tags: android, iphone, open kernel labs