GlobalPlatform, the organisation which standardises the management of applications on secure chip technology, has launched a compliance programme to standardise the trusted execution environment (TEE).
The certification of products to GlobalPlatform’s TEE Specification Suite will promote confidence within the advancing mobile secure services landscape by establishing an agreed industry framework. This will lower the cost of progress by industry players such as application developers, hardware manufacturers and software developers by removing barriers caused by interoperability issues.
The TEE is a secure area that resides in the main processor of a smart phone (or any connected device) and ensures that sensitive data is stored, processed and protected in a trusted environment. The TEE’s ability to offer safe execution of authorised security software, known as ‘trusted applications’, enables it to provide end-to-end security by enforcing protection, confidentiality, integrity and data access rights. Trusted applications include, for example, mobile financial services, content protection and enterprise services.
GlobalPlatform recognises the important role the TEE plays in bridging the gap between the rich operating system (such as Android, Windows Phone and Symbian) and the secure element (SE). To bring standardisation and clarity to this technical space, the industry body has released a number of specifications that can be downloaded. These detail the hardware and software architectures behind the TEE, how to develop trusted applications, and the communication between applications running in a rich operating system and trusted applications residing in the TEE.
FIME and Galitt have received GlobalPlatform qualification for their TEE test tools which will evaluate and qualify the functional aspects of a TEE to GlobalPlatform’s Specifications. The new test tools use an advanced test suite which has resulted from the strong commitment and expertise of GlobalPlatform members Gemalto, Texas Instrument, and STMicroelectronics.