Velox VM: A safe execution environment for resource-constrained IoT applications

In the context of IoT devices, there are typically severe energy, memory, and processing constraints that make the design and implementation of a virtual machine with such features challenging. We elaborate on how Velox is implemented in a resource-efficient manner, and describe our port of Velox to the Contiki OS. Our experimental evaluation shows that we can control the resource usage of applications with a low overhead. We further show that, for typical I/O-driven IoT applications, the CPU and energy overhead of executing Velox bytecode is as low as 1-5% compared to corresponding applications compiled to machine code. Lastly, we demonstrate how application policies can be used to mitigate the possibility of exploiting vulnerable applications.