TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

Abstract

The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make them smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARMbased processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting.In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.

MicroTEE: Designing TEE OS Based on the Microkernel Architecture

“…It provides security against both physical and software attacks. SoftME [26], CaSE [27], TrustShadow [28], and CryptMe [29] provide TEE system with approaches to resist physical attacks.…”

Security, Performance and Energy Trade-Offs of Hardware-Assisted Memory Protection Mechanisms

“…As shown on simple operations in the introduction of this paper, homomorphic encryption still imposes a large performance penalty. TrustShadow [60] isolates standard applications from the operating system using ARM TrustZone [33], which is to some extent similar to SGX and SEV. Along the same lines as our SGX approach, TrustShadow executes standard applications inside a trusted environment and coordinates the communication between the application and the operating system.…”

Achieving Data Dissemination with Security using FIWARE and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX)

“…This IoT Gateway can be any device more powerful than the smart meters, for example, capable of processing more complex operations on their generated data or having better communication capabilities. This scenario is often known as fog/edge computing, since the IoT devices are connected to another device with more processing capacity and which is closest to the network edge [13].…”

“…Their experiments resulted in a relative low overhead. Guan et al [13] proposed TrustShadow, a system to shield legacy applications, running on multiprogramming IoT devices, from untrusted OSes. It uses ARM TrustZone technology (TEE) to secure critical applications and it has presented negligible or moderate overhead running real applications.…”