CIM: Hardware Support for Multi-COS Isolation of RF-UCard

Abstract

A radio frequency universal smart card (RF-UCard) is a novel smart card which can support multiple chip operating systems (COS) on a single card and can enable radio frequency communication with readers. We are inspired from the traditional conference processes, and present the conference-based isolation model (CIM), a hardware architecture support for providing strong security isolation between multiple on-card COSes on RF-UCard. This is achieved by adding a physical isolated memory to host the running COS and its apps, whereas the other idle COSes are stored in another physical memory. In addition, the dual-core structure as well as the data bus multiplexer/demultiplexer are deployed in the CIM architecture to enforce the security isolation to be available. We have given the behavioral simulation on ModelSim by transforming the CIM architecture into a holistic VHDL model and synthesized it on FPGA.