FlexClave: An Extensible and Secure Trusted Execution Environment Framework

As computer system software stacks become increasingly complex, the associated security risks also escalate. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have emerged as a mainstream security solution to enhance system security. TEEs can be categorized into user-level TEEs, OS-level TEEs, and hybrid TEEs. However, these TEEs typically possess fixed security boundaries and isolation domains, limiting their adaptability to varying security requirements and dynamic scenarios. Moreover, the design of Trusted Computing Base (TCB) components in TEE frameworks often operates at the highest privilege levels of the architecture. This concentration of critical code at the highest privilege level increases the whole platform’s security risk due to the growing amount of code as more security functions are added. In this paper, we propose FlexClave, an extensible and secure TEE framework designed to address these issues. FlexClave leverages hardware primitives to create secure isolation boundaries tailored to different use cases. Additionally, our framework distributes TCB components across various privilege levels, reducing the concentration of security functions at the highest privilege levels and mitigating the risks associated with running extensive code in a single, highly privileged context. We implement two prototypes on ARMv9-A Fixed Virtual Platform and ARMv8 RK3399 SoC, each with two use cases (container and virtual machine), to evaluate the system’s security and performance.