Meng Yu, "Protection against Compromised Operating Systems on ARM Cortex-A Architecture"

Summary: ARM possessors are being widely used on mobile devices and smart IoT devices. Despite the best efforts, an operating system is too hard to be absolutely secured on both x86 and ARM platforms. We addresse the problem of executing an unmodified application in a compromised OS for ARM platforms. Existing protection mechanisms mainly focus on x86 platform, utilizing SGX of Intel Processors or a hypervisor which is running below an operating system. However, SGX is not available for ARM platform, and hypervisor is an overkill for embedded or IoT settings. We descript how to achieve the security goals on ARM Cortex-A processors using ARM specific designs. We also discuss the threats of side-channels and possible mitigations.