TEEp: Supporting Secure Parallel Processing in ARM TrustZone

Abstract

Machine learning applications are getting prevelent on various computing platforms, including cloud servers, smart phones, IoT devices, etc. For these applications, security is one of the most emergent requirements. While trusted execution environment (TEE) like ARM TrustZone has been widely used to protect critical prodecures including fingerprint authentication and mobile payment, state-of-the-art implementations of TEE OS lack the support for multi-threading and are not suitable for computing-intensive workloads. This is because current TEE OSes are usually designed for hosting security critical tasks, which are typically small and non-computing-intensive. Thus, most of TEE OSes do not support multi-threading in order to minimize the size of the trusted computing base (TCB). In this paper, we propose TEEp, a system that enables multi-threading in TEE without weakening security, and supports existing multi-threaded applications to run directly in TEE. Our design includes a novel multithreading mechanism based on the cooperation between the TEE OS and the host OS, without trusting the host OS. We implement our system based on OP-TEE and port it to two platforms: a HiKey 970 development board as mobile platform, and a Huawei Hi1610 ARM server as server platform. We run TensorFlow Lite on the development board and TensorFlow on the server for performance evaluation in TEE. The result shows that our system can improve the throughput of TensorFlow Lite on 5 models to 3.2x when 4 cores are available, with 13.5% overhead compared with Linux on average.