Fortress: Securing IoT Peripherals with Trusted Execution Environments

With the increasing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, securing sensitive user data has emerged as a major challenge. These devices often collect confidential information, such as audio and visual data, through peripheral inputs like microphones and cameras. Such sensitive information is then exposed to potential threats, either from malicious software with high-level access rights or transmitted (sometimes inadvertently) to untrusted cloud services. In this paper, we propose a generic design to enhance the privacy in IoT-based systems by isolating peripheral I/O memory regions in a secure kernel space of a trusted execution environment (TEE). Only a minimal set of peripheral driver code, resident within the secure kernel, can access this protected memory area.