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Trusted-Firmware-M Integration with Zephyr 2.3.0

By July 28, 2020No Comments

By Kevin Townsend, Senior Engineer, Linaro IoT and Embedded Group

This blog originally ran on the Linaro website. To find content like this, click on their blog.

The Zephyr 2.3 release features out of the box support for Trusted-Firmware-M, including hardware emulation via QEMU, meaning you don’t require physical access to a supported development board.

Zephyr is configured to run in the non-secure processing environment, and TF-M is used in the secure processing environment, with communication between the two environments happening over TF-M’s IPC mechanism. Both secure and non-secure images are signed, and validated by the secure BL2 bootloader at startup. Zephyr applications can make direct use of the PSA APIs for Cryptography, Initial Attestation, etc., and the IPC mechanism will be handled transparently from an application point of view.

General Requirements

This post details some of the steps required to test TF-M integration in Zephyr using QEMU, with only minor changes required to run the samples on actual hardware.

NOTE : Zephyr currently supports TF-M integration with the MPS2 AN521 and Musca B1 board targets, with LPCXpresso55S69 support planned in the near future now that LPC55S69 support is available upstream in TF-M. The AN521 build target has been setup in Zephyr to optionally work with QEMU.

Zephyr 2.3 RC1 was used writing this, but 2.3 may be finalised by the time you read this. The instructions found here should remain consistent with anything from 2.3 RC1 and higher.

At present, the TF-M integration has been tested on the following platforms, and will not work on Windows out of the box:

  • Ubuntu 18.04 using Zephyr SDK 0.11.3
  • macOS Mojave using QEMU 4.2.0 with gcc-arm-none-eabi-7-2018-q2-update
Zephyr Setup

Follow Zephyr’s Getting Started Guide available here.

TF-M Setup

TF-M has a few additional requirements to enable building the secure-side firmware image. The following Python packages must be available on your system, since they are used by TF-M when signing binary images for secure bootloader verification at startup:

$ pip3 install --user cryptography pyasn1 pyyaml cbor>=1.0.0

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Additionally, the srec_cat utility is required when merging signed application images at the end of the build process. This can be installed via the srecord package available on both Linux(-y) distributions and OS X via some variation of:

$ sudo apt-get install srecord

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Or in the case of OS X:

$ brew install srecord

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QEMU Setup

If you are using the Zephyr SDK on Linux, QEMU 4.2.0 is already included in the SDK and no further action is required.

If you are using OS X, however, you will also need to install QEMU and make it available on your system path. QEMU 4.0.0 included support for the AN521 target, but we recommend using QEMU 4.2.0 or higher, which is the release used in the Zephyr SDK and during the TF-M/Zephyr integration work. This is generally as easy as running:

$ brew install qemu

You can test the installation and path access with the following command:

$ qemu-system-arm --version
QEMU emulator version 4.2.0
Copyright (c) 2003-2019 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers
Building a TF-M application

At this point we can build a test application in Zephyr via the following command sequence:

$ source zephyr/zephyr.sh
$ west build -p -b mps2_an521_nonsecure zephyr/samples/tfm_integration/psa_level_1/ -t run

This will cause TF-M to be built in the background, and the S image (from TF-M- and NS image (from Zephyr) will both be signed with a signature that the BL2 secure bootloader will accept, and an optional binary for QEMU will be generated in addition to the standard AN521 binary images. The -t run flag will cause QEMU to execute the specially prepared binary once the build process is complete, and you should see some variation of the following output:

[INF] Starting bootloader
[INF] Image 0: version=0.0.0+1, magic= good, image_ok=0x3
[INF] Image 1: No valid image
[INF] Booting image from the primary slot
[INF] Bootloader chainload address offset: 0x80000
[INF] Jumping to the first image slot
[Sec Thread] Secure image initializing!
TF-M isolation level is: 1
Booting TFM v1.0
*** Booting Zephyr OS build v2.3.0-rc1  ***
[00:00:00.003,000] <inf> app: app_cfg: Creating new config file with UID 0x155cfda7a
[00:00:03.516,000] <inf> app: att: System IAT size is: 453 bytes.
[00:00:03.516,000] <inf> app: att: Requesting IAT with 64 byte challenge.
[00:00:06.922,000] <inf> app: att: IAT data received: 453 bytes.

          0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
00000000 D2 84 43 A1 01 26 A0 59 01 79 AA 3A 00 01 24 FF ..C..&.Y.y.:..$.
00000010 58 40 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77 88 99 AA BB CC DD X@.."3DUfw......
00000020 EE FF 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77 88 99 AA BB CC DD ...."3DUfw......
00000030 EE FF 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77 88 99 AA BB CC DD ...."3DUfw......
00000040 EE FF 00 11 22 33 44 55 66 77 88 99 AA BB CC DD ...."3DUfw......
00000050 EE FF 3A 00 01 24 FB 58 20 A0 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 ..:..$.X .......
00000060 A7 A8 A9 AA AB AC AD AE AF B0 B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 ................
00000070 B7 B8 B9 BA BB BC BD BE BF 3A 00 01 25 00 58 21 .........:..%.X!
00000080 01 FA 58 75 5F 65 86 27 CE 54 60 F2 9B 75 29 67 ..Xu_e.'.T`..u)g
00000090 13 24 8C AE 7A D9 E2 98 4B 90 28 0E FC BC B5 02 .$..z...K.(.....
000000A0 48 3A 00 01 24 FA 58 20 AA AA AA AA AA AA AA AA H:..$.X ........
000000B0 BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB CC CC CC CC CC CC CC CC ................
000000C0 DD DD DD DD DD DD DD DD 3A 00 01 24 F8 20 3A 00 ........:..$. :.
000000D0 01 24 F9 19 30 00 3A 00 01 24 FD 81 A5 01 63 53 .$..0.:..$....cS
000000E0 50 45 04 65 30 2E 30 2E 30 05 58 20 BF E6 D8 6F PE.e0.0.0.X ...o
000000F0 88 26 F4 FF 97 FB 96 C4 E6 FB C4 99 3E 46 19 FC .&..........>F..
00000100 56 5D A2 6A DF 34 C3 29 48 9A DC 38 06 66 53 48 V].j.4.)H..8.fSH
00000110 41 32 35 36 02 58 20 C9 16 54 69 9C 13 DA 27 43 A256.X ..Ti...'C
00000120 5C D1 28 80 3D B6 B3 50 0A BC 70 87 39 97 BF 5E \.(.=..P..p.9..^
00000130 9A 58 53 7E 24 4D F1 3A 00 01 25 01 77 77 77 77 .XS~$M.:..%.wwww
00000140 2E 74 72 75 73 74 65 64 66 69 72 6D 77 61 72 65 .trustedfirmware
00000150 2E 6F 72 67 3A 00 01 24 F7 71 50 53 41 5F 49 4F .org:..$.qPSA_IO
00000160 54 5F 50 52 4F 46 49 4C 45 5F 31 3A 00 01 24 FC T_PROFILE_1:..$.
00000170 72 30 36 30 34 35 36 35 32 37 32 38 32 39 31 30 r060456527282910
00000180 30 31 30 58 40 51 33 D9 87 96 A9 91 55 18 9E BF 010X@Q3.....U...
00000190 14 7A E1 76 F5 0F A6 3C 7B F2 3A 1B 59 24 5B 2E .z.v...<{.:.Y$[.
000001A0 67 A8 F8 AB 12 6E 7F 97 FB 28 35 97 89 A5 56 61 g....n...(5...Va
000001B0 8F 00 4E A7 D1 37 5B E5 C1 6A 30 3C F2 00 97 17 ..N..7[..j0<....
000001C0 04 0F 91 74 DA                              	...t.
[00:00:06.964,000] <inf> app: Persisting SECP256R1 key as #1
[00:00:09.402,000] <inf> app: Retrieving public key for key #1
          0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
00000000 04 47 EA AE D9 D6 6D 2E 1D 65 05 F5 04 FE CC 21 .G....m..e.....!
00000010 99 BE 5E 5A 56 6B 4F 1E 0C 43 E2 5B CE 1B 7D 06 ..^ZVkO..C.[..}.
00000020 D7 B3 71 E2 0A 3C 47 ED 84 9F 65 0E DB F9 3D D2 ..q..<G...e...=.
00000030 07 BB 81 A6 73 E6 3B 16 95 19 AC 01 02 CB 1C F5 ....s.;.........
00000040 35                         	                 5
[00:00:11.833,000] <inf> app: Calculating SHA-256 hash of value
          0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
00000000 50 6C 65 61 73 65 20 68 61 73 68 20 61 6E 64 20 Please hash and
00000010 73 69 67 6E 20 74 68 69 73 20 6D 65 73 73 61 67 sign this messag
00000020 65 2E                                       	e.
          0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
00000000 9D 08 E3 E6 DB 1C 12 39 C0 9B 9A 83 84 83 72 7A .......9......rz
00000010 EA 96 9E 1D 13 72 1E 4D 35 75 CC D4 C8 01 41 9C .....r.M5u....A.
[00:00:11.853,000] <inf> app: Signing SHA-256 hash
          0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
00000000 81 FC CE C2 02 96 79 E0 60 A8 0C 53 22 58 F3 17 ......y.`..S"X..
00000010 7A AC 46 60 7E 30 7F 60 03 53 1C 43 CA 31 97 B8 z.F`~0.`.S.C.1..
00000020 47 47 56 E9 19 45 F9 E2 DC 38 68 8D F1 A7 C7 48 GGV..E...8h....H
00000030 96 26 F6 0C 0F 94 D8 E3 9E 66 82 76 A6 BC B4 FC .&.......f.v....
[00:00:15.201,000] <inf> app: Verifying signature for SHA-256 hash
[00:00:20.987,000] <inf> app: Signature verified.
[00:00:23.441,000] <inf> app: Destroyed persistent key #1

Extending the TF-M Sample Applications

The sample application above can easily be extended, or a new application can be started based on one of the samples available here.

Consult the PSA API documentation or TF-M source code, linked below, for details on how to extend the samples:

Key References

The following links are useful to further develop custom applications based on Zephyr 2.3+ and TF-M:

  • PSA API Documentation: Click here
  • TF-M Source Code: Click here.
  • Zephyr’s fork of TF-M for any pull requests or bug reports: Click here.
Zephyr Project