On the security evaluation of the ARM TrustZone extension in a heterogeneous SoC

Abstract

As the complexity of System-on-Chip (SoC) and the reuse of third party IP continues to grow, the security of a heterogeneous SoC has become a critical issue. In order to increase the software security of such SoC, the TrustZone technology has been proposed by ARM to enforce software security. Nevertheless, many SoC embed non-trusted third party Intellectual Property (IP) trying to take the benefits of this technology. In such case, is the security guaranteed by the ARM TrustZone technology reduced by the heterogeneity of SoC? In order to answer to this question, this paper presents relevant attack scenarios based on third party IP to exploit some security failures of the TrustZone extension through the all SoC. At the end, this article proposes to SoC designers to consider some design solutions to limit the impact of a malicious IP.