Green Hills Software, the largest independent vendor of embedded and mobile virtualization solutions, announced an agreement to team with ViaSat Inc. to deliver military-grade security for Android smartphones and tablets. The INTEGRITY® Multivisor™ separation-kernel has been selected as the hypervisor solution for the ViaSat Secured, a mobile enterprise system that addresses the stringent security, privacy, manageability, and usability demands for dual-use — personal and business — smartphones and tablets. ViaSat Secured offers a carrier-agnostic suite of the latest and most popular mobile devices so that users may switch between personal and corporate use.

ViaSat Secured devices are pre-programmed with Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY Multivisor, a foundational firmware layer of data protection and isolation below the mobile operating system, which enables either a secure single or dual persona solution that cannot be achieved with container-based offerings. ViaSat Secured devices are managed with ViaSat network management, which includes firmware-over-the-air update (FOTA) and enterprise policy management services, as well as an open application programming interface (API) for integrating with popular enterprise Mobile Device Management (MDM) products.

Whether devices are corporate or personal liable, the use of the secure dual persona and enterprise management technology is designed to give consumers complete confidence in the privacy of their photos, contacts, e-mail, and other information while enterprise and government IT administrators manage the device's business persona with assurance in the security of enterprise data both within the device and across the corporate network.

This solution represents a broad collaboration, not only between ViaSat and Green Hills Software, but also across multiple worldwide mobile network operators and major mobile device OEMs.

"ViaSat and Green Hills Software both have a long tradition of bringing dependable, secure, and powerful electronic products to society. INTEGRITY Multivisor architecture provides the foundational security technology that addresses the challenge of the consumerization of IT, enabling consumers to pick devices they love for both personal and business use without compromising functionality and privacy," commented Jon Korecki, executive director of Secure Network Systems at ViaSat.

"Users have been clamoring for the freedom to use their mobile devices in the workplace, but the wide variety of application-level mechanisms for sandboxing personal and corporate data that have flooded the market over the past few years can not provide a meaningful level of security," said Gordon Jones, VP for Secure Virtualization, Green Hills Software. "ViaSat Secured isolates at the mobile device hardware level, below the mobile OS, rendering even root mobile OS exploits completely harmless with respect to enterprise information and network access."

About ViaSat Secured
ViaSat Secured includes an on or off-premise end-to-end security and management service that enables administrators to manage enterprise device use, including how wireless and data I/O peripherals are permitted in an office environment, the enforcement of data-at-rest encryption, firmware-over-the-air updates, and the authentication of user and device to the enterprise network. The ViaSat system is able to control the device from the hypervisor level, providing an unprecedented level of secure management for commercial, off-the-shelf smartphones and tablets. The result is a service that not only reduces TCO for enterprise mobility and improves the consumer mobile experience, but also renders impotent the mobile OS vulnerabilities that affect all other mobile protection systems.

About INTEGRITY Multivisor Technology
Shipping since 2003, INTEGRITY Multivisor architecture is built upon security-certified separation kernel technology that provides highly assured isolation between one or more "guest" operating systems (personas) while also providing a native open standard execution environment for security-critical tasks, including FIPS 140-2 certified and NSA Suite B-compliant data encryption, user authentication, security event auditing, and remote management. INTEGRITY Multivisor technology offers several approaches to virtualization in ARM-powered devices, including paravirtualization and full virtualization with or without hardware hypervisor acceleration. As the digital world grows in complexity, no single operating system suffices. The Multivisor provides the right level of abstraction — the virtual machine — for flexibility, scalability, and portability, enabling elegant yet practical solutions to previously intractable computing problems.