Building a Trustworthy Execution Environment to Defeat Exploits from both Cyber Space and Physical Space for ARM

Le Guan, Chen Cao, Peng Liu, Xinyu Xing, Xinyang Ge, Shengzhi Zhang, Meng Yu, Trent Jaeger
2018 IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing  
The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make them smarter. However, the smartness comes at the cost of multi-vector security exploits. From cyber space, a compromised operating system could access all the data in a cloud-aware IoT device. From physical space, cold-boot attacks and DMA attacks impose a great threat to the unattended devices. In this paper, we propose TrustShadow that provides a comprehensively protected execution environment
more » ... unmodified application running on ARM-based IoT devices. To defeat cyber attacks, 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. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards them to the untrusted normal-world OS, and verifies the returns. The runtime system further employs a page based encryption mechanism to ensure that all the data segments of a security-critical application appear in ciphertext in DRAM chip. When an encrypted data page is accessed, it is transparently decrypted to a page in the internal RAM, which is immune to physical exploits.
doi:10.1109/tdsc.2018.2861756 fatcat:cge7n5y2fbfu5duj6zgqn5gre4