Trusted Execution Environment
An important step in the technological evolution of microcontroller hardware architecture has been recently achieved with the introduction of a domain separation mechanism, which is already present in other architectures, where it is usually referred to as a Trusted Execution Environment, or TEE.
TEE is an abstraction that provides two or more separated execution domains, or “worlds”, with different capabilities and permissions to access devices, resources, and peripherals.
Isolating the execution environment of one or more software components and modules, also generally known as sandboxing, consists of limiting their view of the system, without impacting their performance and normal operation. This is a requirement for many use cases and domains in computer science, and not only for increasing the security of embedded systems.
Similar hardware-assisted isolation mechanisms in other domains are the building blocks of the cloud server...