At the Embedded Systems Conference, Green Hills Software, Inc., announced a major enhancement to its Platform for Secure Networking, adding secure virtualization and new reference platforms.

According to Sue Hares, director of networking solutions, Green Hills Software, GHS's approach to system virtualization enables a complete Linux operating system and its applications ecosystem to securely and seamlessly coexist with the performance, reliability-critical, and real-time portions of networking devices ” all on a single general purpose microprocessor.

System availability is increased, she said, by eliminating the possibility for a non-critical application failure or corruption in the Linux environment to compromise the critical real-time packet traffic applications and services running on the INTEGRITY RTOS.

High availability and secure isolation between networking subsystems is assured by INTEGRITY, and its Common Criteria EAL6+ certified operating system mechanisms. The INTEGRITY advanced security architecture prevents denial-of-service attacks while guaranteeing optimal real-time performance for packet processing applications.

At the conference, the company demoed its Fulcrum Reference Vegas Platform a 48-port 1-Gigabit Ethernet switch chip reference system. The Vegas reference platform consists of the Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking, called Gate, and commercial-grade routing and switching software.

Using Green Hills Software's secure virtualization architecture, a standard Linux operating system that executes on the Freescale MPC8548 general purpose processor of the reference platform, provides system management functionality and other services.

To learn more, go to wwww.ghs.com.fd.