Cost and Effectiveness of TrustZone Defense and Side-Channel Attack on ARM Platform

Naiwei Liu¹⁺, Meng Yu^2*, Wanyu Zang², and Ravi Sandhu¹

¹Institute for Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio TX 78249, USA

²Roosevelt University, Chicago IL 60605, USA

Abstract

Security concerns on ARM platform have been developing in recent years, with some security design and implementations being introduced on ARM platform. As ARM structure is developing into ARMv8 version, some security research and design had been applied into recent chips. For example, TrustZone applies to security concerns of users with ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-M series chips, providing secure and private enclaves. However, the security design on ARM is severely challenged by different type of attackers. Side-channel attack is one of the major threats to ARM platform with TrustZone. In this paper, we have discussions on the performance and overhead of TrustZone and cache-related instructions, and some stats of side-channel attack. Our experimental and theoretical evaluations can help in design of defense framework based on ARM TrustZone, and provide evidence of how efficient FLUSH operations can work in defense against cache threats.

Keywords: ARM TrustZone, System Security, Side-Channel Attack

+: Co-corresponding author: Naiwei Liu
Institute for Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio TX 78249, USA, Tel: +1(210)343-0856, Email: liunaiwei32@gmail.com

*: Co-Corresponding author: Meng Yu
Roosevelt University, Chicago IL 60605, USA, Tel: +1(804)399-2252, Email: myu04@roosevelt.edu

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA), Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 1-15, December 2020 [pdf]

Received: November 2, 2020; Accepted: December 11, 2020; Published: December 31, 2020

DOI: 10.22667/JOWUA.2020.12.31.001