Secure Internal Communication of a Trustzone-Enabled Heterogeneous Soc Lightweight Encryption

Abstract: Security in TrustZone-enabled heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) is gaining increasing attention for several years. Mainly because this type of SoC can be found in more and more applications in servers or in the cloud. The inside-SoC communication layer is one of the main element of heterogeneous SoC; indeed all the data goes through it. Monitoring and controlling inside-SoC communications enables to fend off attacks before system corruption. In this article, we study the feasibility of encrypted data exchange between the secure software executed in a trusted execution environment (TEE) and the secure logic part of an heterogeneous SoC. Experiment are done with a Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC and two lightweight stream ciphers. We show that using lightweight stream ciphers is an efficient solution without excessive overheads.