Trusted Execution Environments: Properties, Applications, and Challenges

Software attacks on modern computer systems have been a persisting challenge for several decades, leading to a continuous arms race between attacks and defenses. As a first line of defense, operating system kernels enforce process isolation to limit potential attacks to only the code containing the vulnerabilities. However, vulnerabilities in the kernel itself (for example, various vulnerabilities found by Google Project Zero), side-channel attacks,¹ or even physical attacks² can be used to undermine process isolation.