Meng Yu, Protection against Compromised Operating Systems on ARM Cortex-A Architecture

ARM possessors are being widely used on mobile devices and smart IoT devices. Despite the best efforts, an operating system is too hard to be absolutely secured on both x86 and ARM platforms. We addresse the problem of executing an unmodified application in a compromised OS for ARM platforms. Existing protection mechanisms mainly focus on x86 platform, utilizing SGX of Intel Processors or a hypervisor which is running below an operating system. However, SGX is not available for ARM platform, and hypervisor is an overkill for embedded or IoT settings. We descript how to achieve the security goals on ARM Cortex-A processors using ARM specific designs. We also discuss the threats of side-channels and possible mitigations. About the speaker: Dr. Meng Yu is a Robert Miner Endowed Chair Professor of Roosevelt University. He is the Chairperson of the Department of Computer Science, Information Technology, and Data Science. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China. Before he joined Roosevelt University, he was a tenure associate professor of University of Texas at San Antonio and Virginia Commonwealth University. His research interests include systems and network security, cloud computing, virtualization and security. His primary research goal is to build more secure and trustworthy system software. He has been working on security problems such as privacy protection in cloud computing, self-healing problem, protection of applications against untrusted operating systems. His research has been supported by funding agencies such as National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, etc. He has served many conference program committees and also organized several international conferences and workshops.