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arXiv · 2007.05876

On Runtime Software Security of TrustZone-M based IoT Devices

Lan Luo·Yue Zhang·Cliff C. Zou·Xinhui Shao·Zhen Ling·Xinwen Fu
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Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly integrated into our daily life. However, such smart devices suffer a broad attack surface. Particularly, attacks targeting the device software at runtime are challenging to defend against if IoT devices use resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). TrustZone-M, a TrustZone extension for MCUs, is an emerging security technique fortifying MCU based IoT devices. This paper presents the first security analysis of potential software security issues in TrustZone-M enabled MCUs. We explore the stack-based buffer overflow (BOF) attack for code injection, return-oriented programming (ROP) attack, heap-based BOF attack, format string attack, and attacks against Non-secure Callable (NSC) functions in the context of TrustZone-M. We validate these attacks using the TrustZone-M enabled SAM L11 MCU. Strategies to mitigate these software attacks are also discussed.

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Lan Luo, Yue Zhang, Cliff C. Zou, Xinhui Shao, Zhen Ling, Xinwen Fu. 2020-07-12. On Runtime Software Security of TrustZone-M based IoT Devices. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.05876

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