Mobile Platform Security Part 1 - N. Asokan Technion Lecture

Mobile Platform Security Part 1 by N. Asokan of Aalto University at Technion Computer Engineering Summer School 2014
Smartphones are ubiquitous. Increasing popularity of smartphones and other personal mobile devices is accompanied with a surge in research in mobile security. But the roots of mobile security goes back to the 1990s. Operating system and hardware security (which we will refer to as "platform security") on mobile devices has taken a very different trajectory than in the personal computer platforms.
In this lecture, I will describe hardware-based "trusted execution environments" (TEEs) commonly available in mobile devices. I will explain how they came about and what their capabilities are. I will also describe the challenges in making them accessible for ordinary app developers and recent efforts to address this challenge. Finally, I will describe some new developments in platform security standardization and briefly outline some open problems.
Time permitting, I will go on to describe software platform security architectures in mobile devices. I will show that they share many common characteristics and point out some instances of different design choices made by their respective designers.