RT-TEE: Real-time System Availability for Cyber-physical Systems using ARM TrustZone

Abstract

Embedded devices are becoming increasingly pervasive in safety-critical systems of the emerging cyber-physical world. While trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as ARM TrustZone, have been widely deployed in mobile platforms, little attention has been given to deployment on real-time cyber-physical systems, which present a different set of challenges compared to mobile applications. For safety-critical cyber-physical systems, such as autonomous drones or automobiles, the current TEE deployment paradigm, which focuses only on confidentiality and integrity, is insufficient. Computation in these systems also needs to be completed in a timely manner (e.g., before the car hits a pedestrian), putting a much stronger emphasis on availability.To bridge this gap, we present RT-TEE, a real-time trusted execution environment. There are three key research challenges. First, RT-TEE bootstraps the ability to ensure availability using a minimal set of hardware primitives on commodity embedded platforms. Second, to balance real-time performance and scheduler complexity, we designed a policy-based event-driven hierarchical scheduler. Third, to mitigate the risks of having device drivers in the secure environment, we designed an I/O reference monitor that leverages software sandboxing and driver debloating to provide fine-grained access control on peripherals while minimizing the trusted computing base (TCB).We implemented prototypes on both ARMv8-A and ARMv8-M platforms. The system is tested on both synthetic tasks and real-life CPS applications. We evaluated rover and plane in simulation and quadcopter both in simulation and with a real drone.