Preliminary Study of Trusted Execution Environments on Heterogeneous Edge Platforms

Abstract

The recent edge computing infrastructure introduces a new computing model that works as a complement of the traditional cloud computing. The edge nodes in the infrastructure reduce the network latency of the cloud computing model and increase data privacy by offloading the sensitive computation from the cloud to the edge. Recent research focuses on the applications and performance of the edge computing, but less attention is paid to the security of this new computing paradigm. Inspired by the recent move of hardware vendors that introducing hardware-assisted Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), we believe applying these TEEs on the edge nodes would be a natural choice to secure the computation and sensitive data on these nodes. In this paper, we investigate the typical hardware-assisted TEEs and evaluate the performance of these TEEs to help analyze the feasibility of deploying them on the edge platforms. Our experiments show that the performance overhead introduced by the TEEs is low, which indicates that integrating these TEEs into the edge nodes can efficiently mitigate security loopholes with a low-performance overhead.