App Developer Centric Trusted Execution Environment

Abstract

ARM TrustZone is the de-facto hardware TEE implementation on mobile devices like smartphones. As a vendor-centric TEE, Trust-Zone greatly overlooks the strong protection demands and requirements from the App developers. Several security solutions have been proposed to enable the TEE-assisted isolation in the Normal World of ARM, attempting to balance the security and usability. However, they are still not full-fledged in serving Apps' needs. In this paper, we introduce LEAP which is a lightweight App developer Centric TEE solution in the Normal World. LEAP offers the auto DevOps tool to help developers to prepare the codes running on it, enables isolated codes to execute in parallel and access peripheral (e.g. mobile GPUs) with ease, and dynamically manage system resources upon Apps' requests. We implement the LEAP prototype on the off-the-shelf ARM platform without any hardware change. We perform the comprehensive analyses and experiments to demonstrate that LEAP is efficient in design, comprehensive in support, and convenient in adoption.