Linaro and Microsoft collaborate on secure media solutions for ARM-based SoCs

Cambridge, UK -- September 9, 2015 -- Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, today announced a major step forward in the delivery of an open source secure media solution for the consumption of premium content on ARM Powered devices. The Linaro Digital Home Group (LHG), with support from the Microsoft PlayReady team and the OpenCDM project, has successfully integrated several security features required by premium content service providers with the Microsoft^® PlayReady^® Digital Rights Management (DRM).

This new solution enables application developers, silicon partners, OEMs, operators, and content owners to use open source technology to build feature-rich, secure products for the Pay TV market. By bringing together all of the essential secure hardware and software elements into an open source design, OEMs can reduce their time-to-market and open up new opportunities for service providers to deliver premium content across more consumer devices built on ARM-based SoCs.

The essential security features include the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), which enables premium content service providers to write their electronic programming guide applications using standard HTML5 once and run it on many devices. Examples of W3C EME compliant devices include set top boxes, SmartTVs, smartphones, tablets, PCs and game devices. The major development in this solution is the integration of Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM with W3C EME, OpenCDM, Chromium and Linaro’s Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment (OP-TEE) on ARM TrustZone^® technology.

The secure media solution has been implemented on an STMicroelectronics STiH410 SoC with an ARM Cortex^®-A9 processor at its core. The new solution integrates the following key components:

• W3C EME (latest version published on 31 March 2015 http://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/)
• Microsoft PlayReady DRM Porting Kit v3.0
• OP-TEE (https://github.com/OP-TEE)
• OpenCDM (https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/open-content-decryption-module)
• Chromium v43

“The Linaro Digital Home Group is extremely pleased to deliver this open source secure media solution to the embedded developer community” said Mark Gregotski, Director of the Linaro Digital Home Group. “This collaboration demonstrates how a commercial DRM, such as Microsoft’s PlayReady, can be integrated into a security framework comprised of open-source components, including the Linaro Open Portable TEE running on ARM TrustZone. We hope this will be the catalyst to accelerate the deployment of secure DRM solutions employing open source software.”

“This is a key milestone that showcases how Microsoft PlayReady DRM works cross-platform in a standard way. We are excited about the collaboration with Linaro, ARM, OP-TEE and OpenCDM. This reference implementation simplifies and accelerates the ability of partners to build rich experiences to deliver secure media solutions, while providing market leading content protection using Microsoft PlayReady” said Dave Bossio, Group Program Manager, Windows Devices Group, Security at Microsoft Corporation.

“Trust is key to future media business models, as valuable content must be protected from server to screen,” said Shiv Ramamurthi, Director, Home Segment Marketing, ARM. “The pay TV ecosystem will see immediate content security benefits from the integration of ARM TrustZone and Microsoft PlayReady DRM technology. This latest open source initiative led by the Linaro Home Group is a milestone in the enablement of next-generation secure content and media experiences for consumers.”

“ST has been a strong contributor to the Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment (OP-TEE) in open source, a key enabler for this integration. As a natural step forward, ST is pleased its STiH410 platform is being used as a vehicle for this effort and for an exciting demo at IBC 2015,” said Yingchih Yang, Advanced System and Security Officer of the Consumer Product Division in STMicroelectronics. “Such Linaro contributions will facilitate premium content consumption across various devices including smartphones, tablets, and set-top-boxes, meeting strong market expectations.”

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the ARM ecosystem. The company is a collaborative engineering organization with over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro’s engineering work is open to all online. For more information about Linaro, visit http://www.linaro.org.