Building Secure Firmware: Armoring the Foundation of the Platform

© Jiewen Yao and Vincent Zimmer 2020

J. Yao, V. ZimmerBuilding Secure Firmwarehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4_13

13. Virtual Firmware

Jiewen Yao¹  and Vincent Zimmer²

(1)

Shanghai, China

(2)

Issaquah, WA, USA

 

In previous chapters, we talked about the security design for the real firmware in the system. Now let’s take a look at the virtual firmware. Figure 13-1 is a typical type-I virtualization architecture. When the system firmware finishes the platform initialization, it launches a hypervisor. Then the hypervisor creates four domains and launches them. Each guest domain has its own virtual firmware. The virtual firmware prepares the required interface for the guest OS and launches the guest OS.

Figure 13-1

Virtualization Architecture

In the ...