LEAP: TrustZone Based Developer-Friendly TEE for Intelligent Mobile Apps
This work provides an incremental improvement in secure execution environments for mobile app developers, particularly those building intelligent applications, by making TrustZone more accessible and efficient.
This paper addresses the difficulty of using ARM TrustZone for mobile app developers, especially for intelligent applications. The authors propose LEAP, a lightweight and developer-friendly TEE solution that enables parallel execution, easy peripheral access, flexible resource management, and an auto DevOps tool. LEAP achieves an average 3.57x speedup for intelligent apps utilizing mobile GPU acceleration compared to state-of-the-art solutions.
ARM TrustZone is widely deployed on commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices for secure execution. However, many Apps cannot enjoy this feature because it brings many constraints to App developers. Previous works have been proposed to build a secure execution environment for developers on top of TrustZone. Unfortunately, these works are still not fully-fledged solutions for mobile Apps, especially for emerging intelligent Apps. To this end, we propose LEAP, which is a lightweight developer-friendly TEE solution for mobile Apps. LEAP enables isolated codes to execute in parallel and access peripheral (e.g., mobile GPUs) with ease, flexibly manages system resources upon different workloads, and offers the auto DevOps tool to help developers prepare the codes running on it. We implement the LEAP prototype on the off-the-shelf ARM platform and conduct extensive experiments on it. The experimental results show that Apps can be adapted to run with LEAP easily and efficiently. Compared to the state-of-the-art work along this research line, LEAP can achieve an average 3.57x speedup in supporting intelligent Apps using mobile GPU acceleration.