Company
Date Published
Author
Jonathan Williams
Word count
1361
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The microvisor-based approach is promising for IoT projects, offering relief from the burdens of maintaining external components and security issues. A microvisor is an IoT approach using hypervisors for microcontrollers, enabling reliable and secure remote operations such as failsafe over-the-air firmware updates. This architecture divides the microcontroller into two sections at boot time, isolating security critical components with TrustZone, allowing complete security and agnosticism in terms of operating system or programming language used. The microvisor takes care of maintaining the IP stack, Wi-Fi and/or cellular modems' firmware and drivers, ensuring device availability for firmware updates, and enabling frequent and reliable firmware updates. This approach also allows for decoupling hardware manufacturing from firmware development and offers new IoT capabilities such as live, line-by-line remote debugging of firmware.