SeCloak: ARM TrustZone-based Mobile Peripheral Control

ABOUT

SeCloak provides users with secure, "virtual" switches to control peripherals on their smart devices by providing a small, OS-agnostic enforcement layer that mediates untrusted accesses to devices.

Figure: Overview of the SeCloak workflow. The leftmost panel shows the untrusted SeCloak app. The second panel shows the steps after the user presses the "Set Preferences" button. The third panel shows a photograph of the SeCloak secure kernel, which (re-)displays the settings to the user and waits for user confirmation. The fourth panel shows the steps taken if the user confirms the settings, such as disabling/enabling devices.

PUBLICATIONS

SeCloak: ARM TrustZone-based Mobile Peripheral Control
Matthew Lentz, Rijurehkha Sen, Peter Druschel, Bobby Bhattacharjee
MobiSys 2018 (International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services)
Paper Slides
Show Abstract

Reliable on-off control of peripherals on smart devices is a key to security and privacy in many scenarios. Journalists want to reliably turn off radios to protect their sources during investigative reporting. Users wish to ensure cameras and microphones are reliably off during private meetings. In this paper, we present SeCloak, an ARM TrustZone-based solution that ensures reliable on-off control of peripherals even when the platform software is compromised. We design a secure kernel that co-exists with software running on mobile devices (e.g., Android and Linux) without requiring any code modifications. An Android prototype demonstrates that mobile peripherals like radios, cameras, and microphones can be controlled reliably with a very small trusted computing base and with minimal performance overhead.

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RESOURCES

Source Code - Secure Kernel @Github

PEOPLE

Small UMD Logo Bobby Bhattacharjee
Small MPI-SWS Logo Peter Druschel
Matthew Lentz
Rijurekha Sen