<i>eWASM</i>: Practical Software Fault Isolation for Reliable Embedded Devices

Peach, Gregor; Pan, Runyu; Wu, Zhuoyi; Parmer, Gabriel; Haster, Christopher; Cherkasova, Ludmila

doi:10.1109/tcad.2020.3012647

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Classic approaches to provide isolation and implement reliable systems on low-end embedded devices have been evolving from constructive (language/compiler-based) memory protection [58]- [62] and hardware-enforced RTOS mechanisms [21], [63], [64], to lightweight virtualization infrastructures [4], [5], [65], [66]. Tock [59] leverages limited hardware protection mechanisms as well as the type-safety features of the Rust programming language to provide a reliable multiprogramming environment for MCUs.…”

Section: Reliable Systems For Mcu-powered Iot Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EPOXY [60] proposes a technique called privilege overlaying and uXOM [61] implements a protection mechanism that leverages the LLVM compiler to translate all memory instructions into unprivileged ones, constraining the code region using the MPU available on Cortex-M MCUs. Peach et al proposed eWASM [62], a runtime environment to constrain memory accesses and control flow, enabled by the aWsm compiler. Several widespread embedded (RT)OSes such as Mbed OS [67], FreeRTOS [68], and Zephyr [69] have already upstream support for task isolation using the MPU.…”

Section: Reliable Systems For Mcu-powered Iot Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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uTango: An Open-Source TEE for IoT Devices

2022

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Security is one of the main challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices are mainly powered by low-cost microcontrollers (MCUs) that typically lack basic hardware security mechanisms to separate security-critical applications from less critical components. Recently, Arm has started to release Cortex-M MCUs enhanced with TrustZone technology (i.e., TrustZone-M), a system-wide security solution aiming at providing robust protection for IoT devices. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) relying on TrustZone hardware have been perceived as safe havens for securing mobile devices. However, for the past few years, considerable effort has gone into unveiling hundreds of vulnerabilities and proposing a collection of relevant defense techniques to address several issues. While new TEE solutions built on TrustZone-M start flourishing, the lessons gathered from the research community appear to be falling short, as these new systems are trapping into the same pitfalls of the past. In this paper, we present uTango, the first multi-world TEE for modern IoT devices. uTango proposes a novel architecture aiming at tackling the major architectural deficiencies currently affecting TrustZone(-M)-assisted TEEs. In particular, we leverage the very same TrustZone hardware primitives used by dual-world implementations to create multiple and equally secure execution environments within the normal world. We demonstrate the benefits of uTango by conducting an extensive evaluation on a real TrustZone-M hardware platform, i.e., Arm Musca-B1. uTango will be open-sourced and freely available on GitHub in hopes of engaging academia and industry on securing the foreseeable trillion IoT devices.

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Section: Reliable Systems For Mcu-powered Iot Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reliable Systems For Mcu-powered Iot Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

uTango: An Open-Source TEE for IoT Devices

2022

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“…Reliable systems for the IoT. Classic approaches to provide isolation and implement reliable systems on resourceconstrained devices have been evolving from constructive (language/compiler-based) memory protection [52]- [56] and hardware-enforced RTOS mechanisms [21], [57], [58], to lightweight virtualization infrastructures [5], [6], [59], [60]. Tock [53] leverages limited hardware protection mechanisms as well as the type-safety features of the Rust programming language to provide a reliable multiprogramming environment for MCUs.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…EPOXY [54] proposes a technique called privilege overlaying and uXOM [55] implements a protection mechanism that leverages the LLVM compiler to translate all memory instructions into unprivileged ones, constraining the code region using the MPU available on Cortex-M MCUs. In [56], Peach et al propose eWASM, which is a runtime to constrain memory accesses and control flow, enabled by the aWsm compiler. Several widespread embedded (RT)OSes such as Mbed OS [61], FreeRTOS [62], and Zephyr [63] have already upstream support for task isolation using the MPU.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

uTango: an open-source TEE for IoT devices

Oliveira¹,

Gomes²,

Pinto³

2021

Preprint

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Security is one of the main challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices are mainly powered by low-cost microcontrollers (MCUs) that typically lack basic hardware security mechanisms to separate security-critical applications from less critical components. Recently, Arm has started to release Cortex-M MCUs enhanced with TrustZone technology (i.e., TrustZone-M), a system-wide security solution aiming at providing robust protection for IoT devices. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) relying on TrustZone hardware have been perceived as safe havens for securing mobile devices. However, for the past few years, considerable effort has gone into unveiling hundreds of vulnerabilities and proposing a collection of relevant defense techniques to address several issues. While new TEE solutions built on TrustZone-M start flourishing, the lessons gathered from the research community appear to be falling short, as these new systems are trapping into the déjà vu pitfalls of the past. In this paper, we present UTANGO, the first multi-world TEE for modern IoT devices. UTANGO proposes a novel architecture aiming at tackling the major architectural deficiencies currently affecting TrustZone(-M)-assisted TEEs. In particular, we leverage the very same TrustZone hardware primitives used by dual-world implementations to create multiple, equally-secure execution environments within the normal world. We demonstrate the benefits of UTANGO by conducting an extensive evaluation on a real TrustZone-M hardware platform, i.e., Arm Musca-B1. UTANGO will be open-sourced and freely available on GitHub in hopes of engaging academia and industry on securing the foreseeable trillion IoT devices.

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“…Consequently, WebAssembly modules can be executed with close to native performance in many scenarios (Jangda et al 2019). The narrow instruction set also allows the implementation of lightweight interpreters for execution on small, resource-constrained devices (Peach et al 2020).…”

Section: Webassembly Bytecodementioning

confidence: 99%

A Portable and Secure Package Format for Executable Simulation Modules based on WebAssembly

Allmaras¹,

Halblaub²,

Held³

et al. 2021

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings

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We propose a new format (Digital Twin Assemblydtasm) for self-contained executable co-simulation modules that is portable and sandboxed, yet offers performance close to native machine code and is sufficiently lightweight for running on embedded devices. Dtasm is based on WebAssembly, a standardized bytecode format for a stack-based virtual machine originally developed for high-performance computations in web browsers. A language-independent binary interface for such modules is described that is functionally comparable to FMI for cosimulation but not tied to a particular programming language. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of this approach and how it can address some specific issues for executable simulation modules running in parallel with the operation of real systems.

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eWASM: Practical Software Fault Isolation for Reliable Embedded Devices

Cited by 16 publications

References 15 publications

uTango: An Open-Source TEE for IoT Devices

uTango: An Open-Source TEE for IoT Devices

uTango: an open-source TEE for IoT devices

A Portable and Secure Package Format for Executable Simulation Modules based on WebAssembly

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