Title: Downgrade Attack on TrustZone,
Abstract: Security-critical tasks require proper isolation from untrusted software.
Chip manufacturers design and include trusted execution environments (TEEs) in
their processors to secure these tasks. The integrity and security of the
software in the trusted environment depend on the verification process of the
system.
We find a form of attack that can be performed on the current implementations
of the widely deployed ARM TrustZone technology. The attack exploits the fact
that the trustlet (TA) or TrustZone OS loading verification procedure may use
the same verification key and may lack proper rollback prevention across
versions. If an exploit works on an out-of-date version, but the vulnerability
is patched on the latest version, an attacker can still use the same exploit to
compromise the latest system by downgrading the software to an older and
exploitable version.
We did experiments on popular devices on the market including those from
Google, Samsung and Huawei, and found that all of them have the risk of being
attacked. Also, we show a real-world example to exploit Qualcomm's QSEE.
In addition, in order to find out which device images share the same
verification key, pattern matching schemes for different vendors are analyzed
and summarized.