Securing display path for security-sensitive applications on mobile devices

• Main Authors: CUI, Jinhua, ZHANG, Yuanyuan, CAI, Zhiping, LIU, Anfeng, LI, Yangyang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Mobile device; secure display; virtualization; trusted computing base; display path; trust anchor; Information Security; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4114; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5117/viewcontent/cmc.2018.055.017.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

While smart devices based on ARM processor bring us a lot of convenience, they also become an attractive target of cyber-attacks. The threat is exaggerated as commodity OSes usually have a large code base and suffer from various software vulnerabilities. Nowadays, adversaries prefer to steal sensitive data by leaking the content of display output by a security-sensitive application. A promising solution is to exploit the hardware visualization extensions provided by modern ARM processors to construct a secure display path between the applications and the display device. In this work, we present a scheme named SecDisplay for trusted display service, it protects sensitive data displayed from being stolen or tampered surreptitiously by a compromised OS. The TCB of SecDisplay mainly consists of a tiny hypervisor and a super light-weight rendering painter, and has only ∼1400 lines of code. We implemented a prototype of SecDisplay and evaluated its performance overhead. The results show that SecDisplay only incurs an average drop of 3.4%.