A Study of Using TEE on Edge Computing

The concept of edge computing introduces a new emerging computing model that mitigates the high latency caused by the data transmission in the traditional cloud computing model and helps to keep the privacy-or security-sensitive data confidential. However, the security of the execution environment on the edge nodes is still a non-negligible concern that threatens the whole computing model. Recently, hardware vendors design dedicated trusted execution environments (TEEs) on different platforms, and integrating these TEEs to the edge nodes would be efficient to secure the computation on these nodes. In this paper, we investigate a variety of popular TEEs on the traditional computing model and discuss the pros and cons of each TEE based on recent research. Moreover, we further study two popular TEEs-Intel software guard extensions (SGX) and ARM TrustZone technology, and conduct comprehensive performance and security analysis on an Intel Fog Node Reference Architecture platform and an ARM Juno development board, respectively. The analysis results show that using these hardware-assisted TEEs on edge computing platforms produces low overhead while achieving higher security. The discussion on the security challenges of the TEEs is also presented to help improve the reliability of these TEEs and edge computing.