Authors
Richard Habeeb
Hao Chen
Man-Ki Yoon
Zhong Shao
Abstract
Due to the growing third-party software stack necessary to build modern data-rich robotics and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it has become important to protect safety-critical and timing-sensitive programs and their communication—even against an adversarial rich operating system (OS). Enclaves and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are often used to protect code and memory against an untrusted OS, but they generally do not have good availability protections. To illustrate, we present three attacks, showing that even with secure timer access and memory protections, existing TEE platforms still face challenges in achieving availability.
In response, we present PARTEE, the first design and implementation of a “partitioning” TEE OS for the diverse, distributed, and time-sensitive robotics software ecosystem. PARTEE ensures time-sensitive enclaves cannot be denied service by partitioning system resources, providing reliable communication channels and a time-sensitive system call interface. We analyze the security and performance of PARTEE using an unmanned aerial vehicle implemented on the Raspberry Pi4B using the ARM TrustZone, and show that despite the behavior of an adversarial partition or a rich OS, the drone’s most safety-critical enclaves remain available and can communicate to prevent harm or damage.
Published
In
Proc. 2025 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'25), Honolulu, Hawaii, December 2025.