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Mobile devices today provide a hardware-protected mode called Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to help protect users from a compromised OS and hypervisor. Today TEE can only be leveraged either by vendor apps or by developers who work with the vendor. Since vendors consider third-party app code untrusted inside the TEE, to allow an app to leverage TEE, app developers have to write the app code in a tailored way to work with the vendor’s SDK. We proposed a novel design to integrate TEE with mobile OS to allow any app to leverage the TEE. Our design incorporates TEE support at the OS level, allowing apps to leverage the TEE without adding app-specific code into the TEE, and while using existing interface to interact with the mobile OS. We implemented our design, called TruZ-Droid, by integrating TrustZone TEE with the Android OS. TruZ-Droid allows apps to leverage the TEE to protect the following: (i) user’s secret input and confirmation, and (ii) sending of user’s secrets to the authorized server. We built a prototype using the TrustZone-enabled HiKey board to evaluate our design. We demonstrated TruZ-Droid’s effectiveness by adding new security features to existing apps to protect user’s sensitive information and attest user’s confirmation. TruZ-Droid’s real-world use case evaluation shows that apps can leverage TrustZone while using existing OS APIs. Our usability study proves that users can correctly interact with TruZ-Droid to protect their security sensitive activities and data.
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Protecting Sensitive Data in Android SQLite Databases Using TrustZone
Applications use SQLite databases for storing data such as fitness/health information, contacts, text messages, calendar among others. Such information is sensitive and worth protecting. SQLite engine do not have built-in security to protect databases, rather, it relies on its environment such as the operating system to provide security for database content. While Android provides security mechanisms for SQLite databases, it has been shown to be inadequate. Proposed solutions are not able to protect sensitive database content when the OS is compromised. Also, some existing solutions fall short in protecting sensitive data if the SQLite database file is relocated to an environment that do not have any security restrictions. We propose a hardware isolation solution, leveraging ARM’s TrustZone to protect sensitive content of databases. We design and implement a prototype system on Hikey development board to demonstrate that TrustZone can be integrated with Android to protect SQLite data. Evaluation results shows our system is practical in and do not break the design patterns in Android application development.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718086
- PAR ID:
- 10104997
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 International Conference on Security & Management
- Volume:
- 2018
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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