Demystifying Arm TrustZone

The world is undergoing an unprecedented technological transformation, evolving into a state where ubiquitous Internet-enabled “things” will be able to generate and share large amounts of security- and privacy-sensitive data. To cope with the security threats that are thus foreseeable, system designers can find in Arm TrustZone hardware technology a most valuable resource. TrustZone is a System-on-Chip and CPU system-wide security solution, available on today’s Arm application processors and present in the new generation Arm microcontrollers, which are expected to dominate the market of smart “things.” Although this technology has remained relatively underground since its inception in 2004, over the past years, numerous initiatives have significantly advanced the state of the art involving Arm TrustZone. Motivated by this revival of interest, this paper presents an in-depth study of TrustZone technology. We provide a comprehensive survey of relevant work from academia and industry, presenting existing systems into two main areas, namely, Trusted Execution Environments and hardware-assisted virtualization. Furthermore, we analyze the most relevant weaknesses of existing systems and propose new research directions within the realm of tiniest devices and the Internet of Things, which we believe to have potential to yield high-impact contributions in the future.

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