Introduction

OP-TEE is an open source Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) leveraging the Arm TrustZone technology. It provides a reference implementation of secure world software for Armv7-A and Armv8-A class processors. Since the TEE is a core component in the Arm ecosystem, it is used in a lot of different use cases and has been deployed in mobile phones, tablets, cameras, set-top boxes etc.

Linaro has a long track record of working with TrustZone and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). Back in 2013 Linaro, together with STMicroelectronics, started working on preparing STMicroelectronics proprietary TEE solution for Open Source. A couple of months later OP-TEE was published and since then Linaro has been a key contributor both in terms of pushing new features as well as doing roadmap planning, maintenance, release work, vulnerability assessment and mitigation of security issues. 

In 2019, OP-TEE was donated to Trusted Firmware, a Linaro Community Project.  Linaro is still responsible for driving the roadmap for OP-TEE in sync with the members of Linaro as well as with the TrustedFirmware.org project. We employ several core maintainers for the OP-TEE project as well as maintainers for the TEE framework in the Linux kernel and U-Boot.

The current focus areas of the project include :

• Work with Arm to ensure that OP-TEE works with newer architectures as well as supports older architectures.
• Make OP-TEE compatible with FF-A specification. Prepare it so that it can be used in environments with Secure Partitions enabled.
• Support technologies which matter to members eg PKCS#11, SCMI Server, Widevine, Keymaster and Gatekeeper TA’s (AOSP) and StMM
• Support virtualization use-cases
• Support other Linaro Projects - Trusted Substrate and Stratos

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