Securing display path for security-sensitive applications on mobile devices
Jinhua Cui, Yuanyuan Zhang, Zhiping Cai, Anfeng Liu, Yangyang Li · Singapore Management University Institutional Knowledge (InK) (Singapore Management University) · 2018
While smart devices based on ARM processor bring us a lot of convenience, they also become an attractive target of cyber-attacks. The threat is exaggerated as commodity OSes usually have a large code base and suffer from various software vulnerabilities. Nowadays, adversaries prefer to steal sensitive data by leaking the content of display output by a security-sensitive applications. A promising solution is to exploit the hardware visualization extensions provided by modern ARM processors to construct a secure display path between the applications and the display device. In this work, we present a scheme named SecDisplay for trusted display service, it protects sensitive data displayed from being stolen or tampered surreptitiously by a compromised OS. The TCB of SecDisplay mainly consists of a tiny hypervisor and a super light-weight rendering painter, and has only ~1400 lines of code. We implemented a prototype of SecDisplay and evaluated its performance overhead. The results show that SecDisplay only incurs an average drop of 3.4%.