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Green Hills Software will be demonstrating the WiFi
platform in its booth #1513 at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco.

“Green Hills Software’s new WiFi reference platform takes much of the time and risk out of the development of WiFi-enabled products,” said Dan Mender, director of business development for Green Hills Software. “It lets developers start with a working system from day one. We deliver all of the software and hardware integrated, including the 802.11 device driver, security protocols, networking stack, embedded operating system, and software development tools.”

The Green Hills WiFi reference platform addresses a broad range of applications, from resource-constrained mobile devices through mission-critical network infrastructure equipment. Accordingly, it can be configured to use Green Hills Software’s ultra-compact or advanced routing TCP/IP stacks, both of which are available in IPv4 or dual-mode IPv4/IPv6 configurations. It can also be used with either of Green Hills Software’s royalty-free embedded operating systems: the small and fast velOSity microkernel for resource-constrained and cost-sensitive devices, or the memory-protected INTEGRITY real-time operating system for devices with high security and protection requirements. Scalability and flexibility between TCP/IP stacks and real-time operating systems allows developers to reuse application code across projects and product generations.

The initial release of Green Hills Software’s WiFi reference platform uses an Intel XScale processor and Conexant PRISM 802.11a/b/g chipset. A software-only WiFi solution is also available for users who choose to integrate with their own custom hardware platforms.

Green Hills Software’s WiFi driver and dual-mode IPv4/IPv6 networking stacks are developed by technology partner Interpeak Inc. “Interpeak’s advanced WiFi, IPv4 and IPv6 security support, coupled with the INTEGRITY RTOS, delivers the industry’s most secure and reliable WiFi platform,” commented Johan Fornaeus, chief executive officer of Interpeak.


Complete security solution

All of the latest WiFi security mechanisms will be available for the Green Hills Software reference platform, including:

• Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)
• WiFi Protected Access with Pre-Shared Keys (WPA-PSK)
• IEEE 802.1x Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), including Transport Level Security (EAP-TLS), Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP), and MD5 authentication

These WiFi security protocols complement the IP security solutions available today for Green Hills Software’s stacks, including IPv6/IPsec, Internet Key Exchange (IKE), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Secure Shell (SSH), Firewall, Crypto and more.

When used with the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS), the Green Hills Software WiFi solution provides the maximum possible level of security for the end platform. The INTEGRITY RTOS allows a system to be divided into multiple partitions, each with a guaranteed allotment of memory and processor time. This prevents a task running in one partition from carrying out a denial-of-service attack on another partition, and ensures that high priority and real-time tasks can continue to run regardless of what else is going on in a system. In addition, hardware memory protection is used to prevent a task in one partition from spying on or corrupting a task in another partition or the operating system itself, thereby protecting against hackers and maliciously inserted code.


Availability

• The WiFi software solution with WEP and WPA-PSK is available now for ARM, Blackfin, Coldfire, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 processors.
• 802.1x supplicant supporting EAP-TLS, EAP-MD5 and PEAP is planned for availability in May 2005, with additional security protocols to follow.
• The reference hardware based on an Intel XScale processor and Conexant 802.11a/b/g chipset will be available in April 2005.