They described the technology in detail here this week at the International Conference on Hardware/ Software Co-design and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS).

It was developed to allow embedded devices, such as mobile phones, digital home electronics and automotive information devices, to coordinate with each other through open networks.

The researchers - Hiroaki Inoue, Akihisa Ikeno, Tsuyoshi Abe, Junji Sakai, and Masato Edahiro of NEC - claim the newly developed technology simultaneously achieves dynamic allocation of the processing performance, required for device coordination, and protection of pre-installed, basic-function software.

According to the researchers, the new technique allows dynamic allocation of some of a multiprocessor system's CPUs to device coordination in a way that is scalable and which allows distributed devices to coordinate activities in a secure way.

The new multiprocessor dynamic-control technology, they said, has at least three benefits.

First, the number of processors for device coordination can be changed freely in response to the required performance without fixed allocation of all processors to pre-installed software. This enables some processors to be dynamically switched for either coordination of other embedded devices or the execution of pre-installed software.

Second, pre-installed software can be protected from device driver bugs or attacks of malicious software during device coordination operation on open networks as a hardware monitor blocks the malicious access issued to memory or I/Os for device coordination.

Third, due to the hardware monitor, the performance overhead of pre-installed software is reduced to almost nothing as compared with software-based conventional systems.

According to the researchers, the dynamic-control technology allows processors contained in an embedded device to be freely allocated to both pre-installed software and device coordination, enabling secure information devices that allow flexible coordination with embedded devices.

Their paper "Dynamic security domain scaling on symmetric multiprocessors for future high-end embedded systems," received the Best Paper Award at CODES+ISSS.