Advancing IoT edge device security: A novel approach integrating lightweight virtualization and trusted execution environments with performance optimization

As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, securing IoT edge devices has become increasingly critical, with threats becoming more sophisticated and frequent. This paper presents a novel security architecture that integrates Lightweight Virtualization (LV) with enhanced Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), designed specifically to strengthen the security of IoT edge devices. Using ARM TrustZone technology, the proposed approach creates a secure execution environment capable of meeting the real-time performance requirements of industrial IoT applications. The architecture provides end-to-end security through embedded virtualization and trust mechanisms, ensuring protection from hardware to application layers and reducing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. Results from rigorous experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed architecture compared to existing security frameworks. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach offers a 40.93% average latency reduction over existing methods. Furthermore, the proposed approach offers a 19.19% average throughput improvement and a 33.65% reduction in average energy over existing methods.