GateKeeper: Operator-centric Trusted App Management Framework on ARM TrustZone

Employing Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology such as ARM TrustZone to deploy sensitive security modules and credentials for secure, authenticated access is the go-to solution to address integrity and confidentiality challenges in untrusted devices. While it has been attracting attention as an effective building block for secure enterprise IT systems (e.g., BYOD), these secure operating systems are often not open-source, and thus system operators and developers have to largely depend on mobile platform vendors to deploy their applications in the secure world on TEE. Our solution, called GateKeeper, addresses the primary obstacle for system operators to adopt ARM TrustZone TEE to deploy their own, in-house security systems, by enabling the operators more control and flexibility on Trusted App (TA) installation and update procedure without mandating involvement of the mobile platform vendors at each iteration. In this paper, we first formulate an ecosystem for enabling such operator-centric TA management, and then discuss the design of GateKeeper, which is a comprehensive framework to enable operator-centric TA management on top of GlobalPlatform specification. We further present a proof-of-concept implementation using OP-TEE open-source secure OS to demonstrate the feasibility and practical resource consumption (less than 1000 lines of code and 500 KBytes on memory).