MPSoC hypervisor: The safe & secure future of avionics

Future avionics must provide increased performance and security while maintaining safety. The additional security capabilities now being required in commercial avionics equipment arise from integration and centralization of processing capabilities combined with passenger expectations for enhanced communications connectivity. Certification of airborne electronic hardware has long provided rigorous assurance of the safety of flight, but security of information is a more recent requirement for avionics processors and communications systems. In this paper, we explore promising options for future avionics equipment leveraging the latest embedded processing hardware and software technologies and techniques. The Xilinx Zynq® UltraScale+TM MultiProcessor System on Chip (MPSoC) provides one promising avionics solution from a hardware standpoint. The MPSoC provides a high performance heterogeneous multicore processing system and programmable logic in a single device with enhanced safety and security features. Combining this processor solution with a safe and secure software hypervisor solution unlocks many opportunities to address the next generation of airborne computing requirements while satisfying embedded multicore hardware and software certification objectives. In this paper we review the Zynq MPSoC and use of a software hypervisor to provide robust partitioning via virtualization. Partitioning is well established to support safety of flight in Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) while maintaining reasonable performance. Security is a more recent concern, gaining attention as a vulnerability that can also affect safety in unanticipated ways. Hypervisor-based partitioning provides strong isolation that can reduce covert side channels of information exchange and support Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS).