Open Access

ARTICLE

Securing Display Path for Security-Sensitive Applications on Mobile Devices

Jinhua Cui^1,2, Yuanyuan Zhang³, Zhiping Cai^1,*, Anfeng Liu⁴, Yangyang Li⁵

1 College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
2 SMU Labs, Singapore Management University, Singapore 178895, Singapore.
3 College of Mathematics and Informatics, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350117, China.
4 School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
5 Innovation Center, China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology, Beijing 100041, China.

* Corresponding author: Zhiping Cai. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2018, 55(1), 17-35. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmc.2018.055.017

Abstract

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 application. 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%.

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Keywords

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