LEAP: TrustZone Based Developer-Friendly TEE for Intelligent Mobile Apps

TL;DR

LEAP is a lightweight, developer-friendly trusted execution environment for mobile apps that enhances security, resource management, and GPU acceleration, significantly improving performance for intelligent mobile applications.

Contribution

LEAP introduces a flexible, parallel-execution TEE with GPU access and auto DevOps tools, tailored for intelligent mobile apps on ARM platforms.

Findings

Achieves 3.57x speedup in GPU-accelerated intelligent apps

Supports parallel execution and peripheral access efficiently

Eases app adaptation to secure environment

Abstract

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.