ICORe: Continuous and proactive extrospection on multi-core IoT devices

Abstract

In this paper, we present ICORE, a novel continuous and proactive extrospection system with high visibility on IoT devices deploying multi-core ARM platforms. Dedicated cores named Isolated Cores are configured to stay in the TrustZone secure world upon system boot to perform monitoring functionalities to extrospect static normal world kernel memory area proactively, continuously, and stealthily. Different from the existing TrustZone paradigm, in which secure world serves as the slave of the normal world, ICORE makes the secure world play a master role. Therefore, ICORE remains stealthy and proactive to perform monitoring functionalities. The evaluation results show that ICORE is effective and imposes negligible performance degradation using the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark. © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.