It's TEEtime: A New Architecture Bringing Sovereignty to Smartphones
Friederike Groschupp, Mark Kuhne, Moritz Schneider, Ivan Puddu, Shweta, Shinde, Srdjan Capkun

TL;DR
The paper introduces TEEtime, a novel smartphone architecture that enhances user sovereignty by enabling isolated execution domains with direct peripheral access, balancing control among stakeholders without virtualization.
Contribution
It presents the first TEE architecture allowing isolated domains to access peripherals directly, based on Armv8-A, maintaining ecosystem compatibility without virtualization.
Findings
Prototype implementation demonstrates feasibility.
Sensitive applications run successfully on TEEtime.
Peripheral isolation achieved with novel memory and interrupt protection mechanisms.
Abstract
Modern smartphones are complex systems in which control over phone resources is exercised by phone manufacturers, OS vendors, and users. These stakeholders have diverse and often competing interests. Barring some exceptions, users entrust their security and privacy to OS vendors (Android and iOS) and need to accept their constraints. Manufacturers protect their firmware and peripherals from the OS by executing in the highest privilege and leveraging dedicated CPUs and TEEs. OS vendors need to trust the highest privileged code deployed by manufacturers. This division of control over the phone is not ideal for OS vendors and is even more disadvantageous for the users. Users are generally limited in what applications they can install on their devices, in the privacy model and trust assumptions of the existing applications, and in the functionalities that applications can have. We propose…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
