Flowchain Hardware Device Security

Published in

Flowchain Knowledge Camp

3 min readOct 3, 2019

This topic focuses on how Flowchain achieved the security technology. There are two parts of topics for ARM Series chip and Zephyr RTOS I will introduce in detail.

A. ARM Series

There are three kinds of ARM chips for Cortex-A, Cortex-R, Cortex -M series respectively. Flowchain uses ARM Cortex-M to realize its Products. Cortex-M has the advantage of system-wide security for IoT devices by TrustZone technology.

TrustZone technology for Arm Cortex-M processors enables robust levels of protection at all cost points for IoT devices. The technology reduces the potential for attack by isolating the critical security firmware, assets and private information from the rest of the application.

Embedded software developers enhance their productivity by developing TrustZone systems using C language, while maintaining the existing programmer’s model for the Non-secure side. Debug operations are also supported with sensitivity to access the secure versus the non-secure states

So there some IoT applications seeing the Following Figure.3, like smart cars, smartwatch, smart key for our life.

Figure3. TrustZone technology for some applications

B. Zephyr OS(Operation System)

Zephyr is a scalable real-time operating system(RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures. It can build with safety and security IoT devices.

Zephyr Github: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr

Figure4. multiple hardware architectures

Why we need Zephyr OS :

Zephyr stands out from the crowd as it provides a scalable, customizable, secure and open source operating system to be used across multiple architectures.
Zephyr is expected to take the best of both sides: low-consumption as well as speed.
Apart from the special features, Zephyr also supports technologies including Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4, 6Lowpan, CoAP, IPv4 and IPv6, NFC, Arduino 101, Arduino Due, Intel Galileo’ Gen 2, and NXP FRDM-K64F Freedom board.

Above Zephyr virtues described, Linux Foundation Launches ‘Zephyr’, being a tiny OS for Internet of Things, and Flowchain developed own framework for the application of its product, seeing in Figure 5.