Reconciling Security with Virtualization: A Dual-Hypervisor Design for ARM TrustZone

This paper proposes a novel design to enable the virtualization of both secure and non-secure worlds offered by ARM platforms with TrustZone technology. The design is based on a dual-hypervisor scheme that allows executing multiple two-world domains in isolation, where each of them can comprise both a standard (i.e., non-secure) execution environment, and a trusted execution environment (TEE). An implementation of the proposed design is presented and discussed by building upon Xvisor, a Type-1 open-source hypervisor. Experimental results to assess the performance of the implementation are finally reported and discussed.