Samsung Trusted Boot and TrustZone Integrity Management Explained

When you boot up any device, that jump rom a powered-down processor to a device running trusted software requires hardware support. The old Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) of over 30 years ago didn’t provide any protections — it could barely get an operating system loaded. Since then, system vendors have been trying to build more security into the boot process. Industry-standard approaches such as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) have set the groundwork and created best practices. Today, smartphones need that same protection. The Android community has specified some starting points, but device vendors, such as Samsung, have built on those to bring smartphone security to “enterprise-ready” levels. The end goal is to make sure the smartphone is running trusted software. Two components helping ensure that are secure booting with Samsung Trusted Boot and kernel integrity checking through TrustZone-based Integrity Management Architecture (TIMA).[…]