An Architecture for Shrinking the TCB of TEEs on Heterogeneous Systems

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) enable secure code execution on machines that are not fully controlled by the user who runs the code. However, existing TEE solutions do not provide unified support for systems with heterogeneous core architectures or accelerators. Furthermore, their implementation is complex and requires the user to trust (typically closed) firmware in addition to the TEE hardware. We propose a heterogeneous TEE architecture with minimal hardware support to reduce the trust in firmware, as well as a minimal Root-of-Trust that enables features such as remote attestation for such TEEs.