The ARM TechCon in Silicon Valley was told that the new designs will stop devices from being hacked and recruited into huge botnet swarms.

TrustZone has been around for a decade for Windows, Mac OS and Android products but never for chips this small or low-powered.

ARM’s new Cortex-M33 chip design is just one-tenth of a square millimeter, and the Cortex-M23 is 75 percent smaller than that. They are based on the new ARMv8-M architecture and are designed to work with ARM's mbed OS. Already Chip vendors including Analog Devices, NXP and STMicroelectronics have already licensed the design.

ARM expects chips based on them to be used in products like bandages that collect and send medical data, tracking tags for packages in transit, and portable blood-monitoring devices.

These things won’t be plugged in to an outlet and may not even have batteries: A pocket-sized blood-testing device for diabetics could harvest enough energy to do its job just from the motion of the user removing the cap, ARM says.

ARM also introduced a cloud-based platform for managing and updating IoT processors for as long as they’re deployed. The mbed Cloud software-as-a-service platform is designed to solve the problem of how to manage millions of chips in devices that may be deployed all over a city or a global enterprise.

When a device boots up, mbed Cloud can provide a security key for the communications channel and specify who can get access to the data from the device, based on enterprise policies.

The service can also help to prevent IoT-based denial-of-service attacks by monitoring what’s going on in the network. If there are abnormally chatty devices, it can isolate them or shut them down.
The service can be run on multiple public clouds.