DBStore: A TrustZone-backed Database Management System for Mobile Applications

Pedro S. Ribeiro, Nuno Santos, Nuno O. Duarte
2018 Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications  
ARM TrustZone technology has been widely use to enhance the security of mobile devices by allowing for the creation of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). However, existing TEE solutions tend to struggle with a trade-off between security and functionality: they either expose a larger attack surface to favor dynamic code loading inside the TEE, or depend on the static deployment of trusted services inside the TEE which is more cumbersome and error-prone to maintain. This paper proposes the
more » ... oyment of a trusted service which aims to serve a broad range of applications by offering secure database storage capability inside the TEE. We present DBStore, a TrustZone-backed database management system for mobile applications. Applications can create and operate DBStore databases inside a TEE that provides confidentiality and integrity protection of databases and respective SQL queries without depending on the integrity of the mobile OS. We present a case study where DBStore is used in order to thwart existing attacks in HCE-based mobile ticketing applications. 396 Ribeiro, P., Santos, N. and Duarte, N. DBStore: A TrustZone-backed Database Management System for Mobile Applications.
doi:10.5220/0006883605620569 dblp:conf/icete/Ribeiro0D18 fatcat:hsqpdigurbhc7agfyfj5tnmygm