Secure HyperCell Technology

The Secure HypercCell™ architecture provides an environment for the development and deployment of trustworthy embedded systems. It centers around a set of secure and isolated partitions (or cells), each of which may contain any system software component or components – complete OS environment (virtual machine), operating system component (file system, network stack, etc.), application or driver. These secure cells exist at user-level and are securely isolated by the OKL4 microkernel running in privileged mode. The OKL4 microkernel also provides a mechanism that only allows communication between cells that have been explicitly authorized to communicate.

The only code running in privileged mode is the OK Labs microkernel itself, which provides the virtualization, partitioning, and communications mechanisms (the IPC) for the other system components. Since there is no other part of the system which has access to the privileged mode, the system integrity cannot be compromised by deliberate intrusion or defective code within any of the cells composing the system. Furthermore, since any number of user level system components can be segregated individually in secure and isolated partitions, the potential impact of malicious or unstable code even at user level can be limited precisely to the extent determined by the developer, according to the requirements of the application.