Ringmaster: How to juggle high-throughput host OS system calls from TrustZone TEEs

Last modified: Tue Apr 14 16:59:39 2026 GMT.

Authors

Richard Habeeb
Man-Ki Yoon
Hao Chen
Zhong Shao

Abstract

Many safety-critical systems require the timely processing of sensor inputs to avoid potential safety hazards. Additionally, to support useful application features, such systems increasingly have a large, rich operating system (OS) at the cost of potential security bugs. Thus, if a malicious party gains supervisor privileges, they could cause real-world damage by denying service to time-sensitive programs. Many past approaches to this problem completely isolate time-sensitive programs with a hypervisor; however, this prevents the programs from accessing useful OS services. We introduce Ringmaster, a novel framework that enables enclaves or TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) to asynchronously access rich, but potentially untrusted, OS services via Linux's io_uring. When the untrusted OS denies service, enclaves continue to operate on Ringmaster's minimal ARM TrustZone kernel with access to small, critical device drivers. This approach balances the need for secure, time-sensitive processing with the convenience of rich OS services. Additionally, Ringmaster supports large unmodified programs as enclaves, offering lower overhead compared to existing systems. We demonstrate how Ringmaster helps us build a working, highly secure system with minimal engineering. In our experiments with an unmanned aerial vehicle, Ringmaster achieved nearly 1GiB/sec of data into enclaves on a Raspberry Pi4B, 0-3% throughput overhead compared to non-enclave tasks.

Published

In Proc. 24th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys'26), Cambridge, UK, June 2026.

Conference Paper [PDF]

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