A Flexible Software Development and Emulation Framework for ARM TrustZone

ARM TrustZone is a hardware isolation mechanism to improve software security. Despite its widespread availability in mobile and embedded devices, development of software for it has been hampered by a lack of openly available emulation and development frameworks. In this paper we provide a comprehensive open-source software environment for experiments with ARM TrustZone, based on the foundations of the well known open-source QEMU platform emulator. Our software framework is complemented by a prototype kernel running within a trusted environment. We validate our software environment with an application example featuring a software based Trusted Platform Module hosted in a TrustZone protected runtime environment and an Android operating system accessing it through an high-level, industry-standard Trusted Computing API.

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