On Making Emerging Trusted Execution Environments Accessible to Developers

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and ongoing efforts to standardize TEE interfaces across emerging architectures like TrustLite and SGX to facilitate developer access and security solutions.

Contribution

It presents an approach to map GlobalPlatform standard interfaces onto TrustLite and SGX architectures, addressing interoperability challenges.

Findings

Mapping GlobalPlatform interfaces to TrustLite and SGX is complex.

Standardized TEE interfaces can lower developer barriers.

Ongoing work demonstrates feasibility of interface mapping.

Abstract

New types of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) architectures like TrustLite and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are emerging. They bring new features that can lead to innovative security and privacy solutions. But each new TEE environment comes with its own set of interfaces and programming paradigms, thus raising the barrier for entry for developers who want to make use of these TEEs. In this paper, we motivate the need for realizing standard TEE interfaces on such emerging TEE architectures and show that this exercise is not straightforward. We report on our on-going work in mapping GlobalPlatform standard interfaces to TrustLite and SGX.