i.MX: Industry’s Only SoC That Can Provide Trust to Microsoft’s New Trusted Cyber Physical Systems

The winning combination of Windows 10 IoT Core with i.MX 6 and i.MX 7 continues to gain traction. Last week at Hannover Messe, Microsoft announced their Trusted Cyber Physical Systems (TCPS), an improved technology for digital systems to cryptographically secure interactions with the physical world. This technology can prevent the increasing number of attacks against critical infrastructure that can cause financial — but more importantly — physical harm.

This announcement builds upon the unique capability of our i.MX architecture to make I/O ports only accessible through Arm TrustZone, enabling trusted I/O.

Our i.MX applications processor is the ONLY SoC with Microsoft’s Windows 10 IoT Core that can provide the trust to the hardware pins that actually control the physical world.

Microsoft has authored a couple of documents on the topic, including a two-page piece, Protecting your Critical Infrastructure from Modern Threats in the World of IoT and a more in-depth whitepaper. The whitepaper on Trusted Cyber Physical Systems highlights this key to the approach:

• All actions and messages — to and from a cyber-physical device, all the way down to the hardware I/O pin — are cryptographically secured. Even if the OS on a cyber-physical system itself is compromised, an attacker will not be able to operate the valve nor tamper with the activity log of the valve. Furthermore, even the OS vendor or ISV cannot access private data nor send unauthorized commands or software updates. This allows a clear separation between the authorized operators of solutions and the software vendors, hardware vendors and solution providers.

Our i.MX 6 and i.MX 7 with Windows 10 IoT Core support enables TCPS to the wire with trusted I/O. It is currently in private preview, but access to the BSP is available at aka.ms/iotnxp. In addition, a pre-installed SOM is available for purchase at SolidRun