(2012 News)
Roughly nine months ago ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient combined their efforts to develop a mobile security platform that would make the process of online payments and mobile devices easier and safer by taking advantage of the devices hardware. It was through this time period that the trio formed a new conglomerate known as Trustonic where they’ve developed, and recently released, their security platform ‘Trusted Execution Environment’ (TEE). The software is designed to help keep our mobile devices secure as we move into common place online environments for shopping, paying bills or accepting payments using devices such as Square. TEE works by prioritizing certain pieces of software to function in tandem with the devices hardware encryption/authentication methods using ARM’s TrustZone silicon prefecture, which is already loaded into ARM’s newest processors such as the Cortex-A series found in most of today’s mobile devices. Essentially the TEE software separates, or creates a barrier, between the devices hardware and its OS (Operating System) which prevents or limits attacks brought about by viruses and malware.
According to Trustonic, the software works seamlessly with the Trustzone architecture, which isolates the devices hardware using AMBI-AXI (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture-Advanced eXtensible Interface) along with specific (unknown) Trustzone System IP blocks. This makes TEE able to isolate various peripherals such as system memory, keyboards and touch-screens from coming under attack (key-loggers, etc.). This makes it easy for companies that deal with banking, payment services or even DRM (Digital Rights Management) and other web-based services to transition to the TEE platform simply by purchasing a software key rather than reconfiguring their hardware. Users then only need to enter a localized PIN number (like that of any ATM) to gain access to services rather than rolling through the myriad of cloud-based identity procedures widely used with online institutions today. While the software hasn’t yet taken off, chances are we will see the platform widely accepted in the near future as companies and institutions start to embrace Trustonic’s TEE platform.
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