The Arm Morello platform is a prototype system that supports hardware capabilities for improving runtime security. Although Morello is a server class compute component, there is ongoing work aimed at bringing architectural capabilities to embedded scale devices. For this reason, we are porting the MicroPython framework to Morello. Our intention is to understand the impact of hardware capabilities on lightweight runtime execution environments, like MicroPython, that target embedded devices.

In this work-in-progress report, we describe the minimal modifications required to compile the C source code of MicroPython for Morello. We show that this approach gives a working, but not necessarily more secure, version of MicroPython. Our paper proceeds to outline how capabilities could be used to improve runtime system security for MicroPython runtime and hosted applications.

Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland since 2010.