System and method for securely saving and restoring a context of a secure program loader

A system, method and program product that securely saves and restores the context of a secure program loader is presented. An interrupt is sent to a secured program running on an special purpose processor core that is running in isolation mode. The special purpose processor core is included in a heterogeneous processing environment that includes the special purpose processor cores (including the isolated special purpose processor core), and one or more general purpose processors. Each of the processors can access a shared memory. The isolated special purpose processor core includes a local memory that is inaccessible from the other processors. The system encrypts the secured program's context using a randomly generated encryption key and stores the context in the shared memory. A secure loader's context is updated with the generated encryption key and then the secure loader's context is saved to the shared memory.