Development of embedded test cases and testing automation for MPUs validation

In the last years mobile smartphones have become an extension of everyday life, by proving ubiquitous access to different services, such as banking, social network, investing, and communications. Therefore, security is one of the most important aspects to consider when design and develop an mobile System on Chip, like Qualcomm Snapdragon. This document is the final report about the internship performed at Qualcomm, as member of SVE team (System Validation and Emulation). The main purpose of this thesis is to show and understand how is performed the validation phase for a security component, by focusing on the implementation of drivers and test cases for the Memory Protection Units. An MPU is an hardware unit that provide memory protection inside the SoC memory, allowing privileged software to define memory regions and assign memory access permission and memory attributes to each of them. The aim of the thesis is to study in deep some of the phases in which MPUs are involved on, as for example the secure boot phase, to better develop a functional validation and to develop an automated multiprocessors testing environment, to test the different accesses domains that could access to MPUs. In the first part of the following document are discussed some general concepts on the validation phase, by distinguish different stages in a systems development life cycle in which this is performed. Chapter 2 deals with inherent concepts related to the Snapdragon's MPUs, as for example ARM TrustZone or QSEE, that allows to ensure isolation at hardware level between many sub-systems, and also the boot process flow in which MPUs plays a primary role. In the Chapter 3 will be presented how it is possible to perform basic debugging and tracing using Lauterbach Trace32 environment, Chapter 4 focus on the validation process using targeted test cases and by applying ad-hoc techniques to automatize the testing. Furthermore, in the next and last part of this thesis will be presented some possible future works, to improve and finalize the implemented testing automation.