LightEMU: Hardware Assisted Fuzzing of Trusted Applications

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.09532
• Publication Date: 2024-05-06
• Authors: Shan, Haoqi; Nissankararao, Sr...; Liu, Yujia; Huang, Moyao; Wang, Shuo; Jin, Yier; Sullivan, Dean
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Cryptography and Security; Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

This paper has been accepted by IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST'2024)<br/>Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are deployed in many CPU designs because of the confidentiality and integrity guarantees they provide. ARM TrustZone is a TEE extensively deployed on smart phones, IoT devices, and notebooks. Specifically, TrustZone is used to separate code execution and data into two worlds, normal world and secure world. However, this separation inherently prevents traditional fuzzing approaches which rely upon coverage-guided feedback and existing fuzzing research is, therefore, extremely limited. In this paper, we present a native and generic method to perform efficient and scalable feedback-driven fuzzing on Trusted Applications (TAs) using ARM CoreSight. We propose LightEMU, a novel fuzzing framework that allows us to fuzz TAs by decoupling them from relied TEE. We argue that LightEMU is a promising first-stage approach for rapidly discovering TA vulnerabilities prior to investing effort in whole system TEE evaluation precisely because the majority of publicly disclosed TrustZone bugs reside in the TA code itself. We implement LightEMU and adapt it to Teegris, Trusty, OP-TEE and QSEE and evaluate 8 real-world TAs while triggering 3 unique crashes and achieving x10 time speedup when fuzzing TAs using the state-of-the-art TrustZone fuzzing framework.<br/>