Poster: Towards Extensible Memory Isolation for Low-End Microcontrollers

In today's interconnected world, specialized memory isolation mechanisms for low-end embedded microcontrollers are becoming vital. Responding to this need, Texas Instruments has developed the promising Intellectual Property Encapsulation (IPE) feature for their popular ultra-low-power MSP430 microcontrollers. Academic researchers have, furthermore, implemented many trusted execution prototypes on the related openMSP430 open-source softcore. Recent research has shown, however, that these diverging code bases suffer from critical hardware and software vulnerabilities that we believe could have been avoided with more coordination. Hence, we present our work in progress on an openly accessible and extensible research platform based on the specification of the proprietary IPE feature. We implement mature hardware support for IPE on openMSP430, extending it with a fully configurable firmware layer, striving for extensible open-source building blocks that provide a solid foundation for future research.