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Has Open Source Router Firmware Found Its Savior With Virtualization?

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Julio Urquidi

News Editor
Imagination Technologies may have found a way to keep open source firmware alive and kicking using virtualization.

imaginationmipdiagram.jpg

Facing pretty tough regulations that affects router firmware, vendors across the networking industry are locking down their products, preventing the installation of open source firmware. The lockdown is an extreme move that’s frustrating to the open source users, and it seems that not much progress is being made to find better solutions. However, the folks at Imagination Technologies may have come up with a doozy.

Over a year ago, the FCC released a security document that looked at the concerns of how U-NII-based wireless devices are accessed, which in turn, lead to a bigger discussion in the networking industry about locking down router products and preventing the installation of open source firmware, such as OpenWRT and DD-WRT.

For some companies, locking down their hardware seemed like the easy way around the new regulations. However, chip designer, Imagination Technologies, recently demonstrated a collaborative solution it developed with help from the folks at the prpl Foundation. Using Imagination’s own dual-core MIPS P5600 CPU, a Realtek RTL8192 Wi-Fi adapter, OpenWrt and prpl’s prplSecurity framework, the company showcased a secure workaround to the FCC’s regulation using virtual machines to isolate the logical components from the transmitting hardware in question.

Using Kernkonzept’s L4Re hypervisor, the demo takes advantage of Imagination’s MIPS processor and runs three virtual machines, with each VM running as an instance of OpenWrt, a Wi-Fi driver and a sandbox for third-party applications. Using this containerized method, the trusted virtual environment is isolated from the radio-controlling software that the FCC is so worried about.

In a video demonstration, Imagination shows their test system in action, but even more, the testers show how knocking out the third sandbox VM - and the applications it hosts – doesn’t affect the other two VMs, leaving the router and its wireless functions operational.

In its blog post, Imagination doesn’t say anything about when or how this possible solution could make its way to being a real product, however Ars Technica reported that Imagination officials said “it should be done within a year.”
 

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