Protecting File Activities via Deception for ARM TrustZone

Abstract

A TrustZone TEE often invokes an external filesystem. While filedata can be encrypted, the revealed file activities leak secrets. To hide the file activities from the filesystem and its OS, we propose Enigma, a deception-based defense injecting sybil file activities as the cover of actual file activities.Enigma contributes three new designs. (1) To make the deception credible, the TEE generates sybil calls by replaying file calls from the TEE code under protection. (2) To make sybil activities cheap, the TEE requests the OS to run K filesystem images simultaneously. Concealing the disk, the TEE backs only one image with the actual disk while backing others by only storing their metadata. (3) To protect filesystem image identities, the TEE shuffles the images frequently, preventing the OS from observing any image for long.Enigma works with unmodified filesystems shipped with Linux. On a low-cost Arm SoC with EXT4 and F2FS, our system can concurrently run as many as 50 filesystem images with 37% disk overhead (less than 1% of disk overhead per image). Compared to common obfuscation for hiding addresses in a flat space, Enigma hides file activities with richer semantics. Its cost is lower by one order of magnitude while achieving the same level of probabilistic security guarantees.1 This paper uses disks to refer to storage hardware including flash.