# Virtualization Airborne Trusted General Computing Technology
## 1 Introduction  
With the evolution of the concept of information-based civil aircraft and the development of integrated avionics technology, information service systems with a safety level of D/E have been deployed in large civil aircraft [1, 2], such as airborne information systems, airborne integrated maintenance management systems, and cabin management systems. Moreover, an airborne general computing service platform (AGCSP) offering a host environment for the above systems has been deployed, which consists in airborne general computing service modules (AGCSMs) [3]. As a line replaceable module (LRM), the AGCSM adopts a 32 bit single-threaded multi-core processor with an embedded Linux operating system, which does not support virtualized partitioning and disallows isolation among computing, storage, and network communication resources for applications. The existing first-generation AGCSP achieves security and isolation of the multiple airborne system applications by adding physical devices, where multiple AGCSMs are integrated in one platform, resulting in an excessively high platform weight and power consumption. In the future, the new generation of information-based civil aircraft need to meet green aviation goals, further lowering energy consumption, reducing carbon emissions, and cutting the weight and power consumption of the AGCSP. As the application scenarios increase, the information interactions among airborne information, airborne maintenance,-cabin management, and airline operation service systems of the new-generation civil aircraft are becoming increasingly complex. Hence, stronger computing storage and network communication capabilities are required for AGCSP. According to the RTCA DO-326A specification [4] and RTCA Do-356A specification [5], new-generation civil aircraft should meet the requirements of information security airworthiness, which, as an AGCSP responsible for the coordination of air-ground business systems, need to have a network security protection capability. Unable to meet the demands of the new-generation civil aircraft, the existing AGCSP faces new challenges. Owing to its high performance and low power consumption, the multi-core computing architecture has become the mainstream architecture of processors such as the PowerPC, X86, and ARM [6; 7; 8]. Virtualization technology can provide multiple applications with an execution environment featuring environmental isolation, scalable resource utilization, controllable operation [9; 10], and platform portability on a single physical hardware platform. It hosts multiple guest operating systems and applications, to more effectively organize and utilize multi-core computing resources [11; 12]. Multi-core processor-based virtualization has been gradually applied in safety critical systems [13; 14; 15]. As the data and service node in an aircraft network, the application of virtualization technology and a multi-core multi-threaded processor enables simultaneous operation of multiple virtual machines (VMs), operating systems, and applications using a single AGCSM. Embedded applications need to run in a trusted computing environment [16]. Trusted computing can achieve active immunity against attacks [17]. Based on the hardware security mechanism in the chip, it can actively detect and resist attacks, and provide data integrity and confidentiality assurance [18]. In the scenarios of the Internet of Things and edge cloud computing, trusted computing can provide an infrastructure for implementing a zero-trust architecture. In reference [19], the authors focus on computing and network virtualization techniques for edge computing and delineate the primary factors for the selection of virtualization types in IoT frameworks. Virtualization techniques can provide temporal isolation, spatial isolation, and fault isolation.