Green Hills Software, Inc.

Green Hills Sofware, Inc.

David Noah Kleidermacher

Daniel D O'Dowd

Daniel Jonathan Hettena

Michael Lindahl

Daniel Michael Hecht

Thomas Cantrell

Dennis Kou

Neil Puthuff

Gregory Davis

Frank John Banul, Iv

In certain embodiments, an information obfuscation service may be incorporated directly into the main applications processor of a portable computing device such that the applications processor and its relevant storage peripherals may be securely shared via a virtualization firmware module, avoiding the use of specialized hardware or major modifications of the operating system. The virtualizing and obfuscating storage firmware module may enable a much higher level of assurance in information-at-rest protection while using only the memory protection and privilege mode facilities inherent in common portable device applications microprocessors. The virtualizing and obfuscating storage firmware may interpose storage accesses originating from the operating system. This interposition may be performed seamlessly, without explicit knowledge of the operating system.

Single-chip virtualizing and obfuscating storage system for portable computing devices

Certain embodiments employ an 'out-of-band' mechanism to remove the physical controls for activating input peripherals from a portable device operating system and instead controlled by a separate peripheral control domain, isolated from the operating system domain by a machine virtualization/isolation technology. No additional hardware may be required. An adjunct I/O virtualization mechanism may also be included to abstract the guarded input peripheral interfaces, such that all attempts to turn them on from within the operating system are automatically redirected by the I/O virtualization mechanism to the peripheral control domain. The peripheral control domain may then conduct a policy-driven decision process to either allow, disallow, or request manual/explicit authorization of an access attempts. Physical access may be performed within the peripheral control domain. Because the access control and physical activation of input peripherals occur out-of-band from the operating system, these security-critical operations may be immune to vulnerabilities in the portable operating system.

Out-of-band spy detection and prevention for portable wireless systems

In certain embodiments, virtualization mechanisms used to defend against spying can also be used by attackers as a means to execute spying attacks more effectively. In certain embodiments, attack methods may use the virtualization mechanisms to surreptitiously activate input peripherals without the user's knowledge or authorization. In certain embodiments, a virtualized network interface may be employed in which all network traffic transiting a portable wireless system is routed through a remote control component within a peripheral control domain. The remote control component may be used by an attacker to communicate remotely with the portable device to send it peripheral activation commands. The remote control component can then activate peripherals via the peripheral access module without the user's or general-purpose operating system's knowledge or authorization. All other network traffic may be passed through as normal and expected to the general-purpose operating system.

Executing a remote control command to activate one or more peripheral of a mobile device in a peripheral control domain

Certain embodiments disclose an integrated dual-device architecture for marrying modern computing devices (e.g. laptops, smartphones and tablets) with standalone tactical radios (e.g. military or first-responder push-to-talk radios) with the goal of leveraging modern mobile devices for improved interfaces and usability (compared to a tactical radio) while reducing the footprint (size, weight, battery power/capacity, and cost) of the tactical radio. Certain embodiments encompass offloading various traditional radio workloads (e.g. voice processing, control/management processing, and cryptographic processing) from the radio onto the mobile device, dramatically simplifying the tactical radio design and cost (e.g. making the radio a 'dumb' transceiver only), and physically conjoining the mobile device with the reduced tactical radio into a single, conveniently operated and transported system.

Hybrid mobile device and radio system

The invention is directed to instrumenting object code of an application and/or an operating system on a target machine so that execution trace data can be generated, collected, and subsequently analyzed for various purposes, such as debugging and performance. Automatic instrumentation may be performed on an application's object code before, during or after linking. A target machine's operating system's object code can be manually or automatically instrumented. By identifying address space switches and thread switches in the operating system's object code, instrumented code can be inserted at locations that enable the execution trace data to be generated. The instrumentation of the operating system and application can enable visibility of total system behavior by enabling generation of trace information sufficient to reconstruct address space switches and context switches.

Post-compile instrumentation of object code for generating execution trace data

A method for time use analysis of a higher level language program is performed by displaying source code lines in descending order according to the amount of time spent by the program to execute machine code into which the source code lines have been compiled. Source code lines are displayed arranged in order according to the percentages of the amounts of time spent in execution during runs of the program, and the higher percentages identified for optimizing actions. A digital processing apparatus for performing the analysis includes a display for showing the source code lines that require the most time of execution, a selection apparatus for selecting those source code lines having the greater opportunity for significant corrective action, and displaying the various selected source code lines in the order in which the lines are kept in the program along with the corresponding time spent by the program to execute machine code into which the source code lines have been compiled. An improved method and apparatus identifies source code lines which a testing program does not test in its test procedure. A digital processing apparatus displays in different orders those source code lines identified as not having been used. Test programs are improved so that machine code instructions for all lines of source code are executed.

Growing community of inventors

Santa Barbara, CA, United States of America

David Noah Kleidermacher