Providing trusted execution environments using FPGA

Abstract

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) drastically reduce the trusted computing base (TCB) of the systems by providing a secure execution environment for security-critical applications that are isolated from the operating system or the hypervisor. TEEs are often assumed to be highly secure; however, over the last few years, TEEs have been proven weak, as either TEEs built upon security-oriented hardware extensions (e.g., Arm TrustZone and Intel SGX) or resorting to dedicated secure elements were exploited multiple times. In this paper, we propose a novel TEE design, named Trusted Execution Environments On-Demand (TEEOD), which leverages the re configurable logic of FPGA-SoCs to dynamically provide secure execution environments for security-critical applications. Unlike other TEE designs, ours can provide high-bandwidth connections and physical on-chip isolation while providing configurable hard ware and software TCBs. We implemented a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation targeting an Ultra96-V2 platform. The conducted evaluation demonstrated TEEOD can host up to 6 simultaneous enclaves with a resource usage per enclave of 7.0%, 3.8%, and 15.3% of the total LUTs, FFs, and BRAMS, respectively.