Lightweight mobile clients privacy protection using trusted execution environments for blockchain

Abstract

Nowadays, as lightweight mobile clients become more powerful and widely used, more and more information is stored on lightweight mobile clients, user sensitive data privacy protection has become an urgent concern and problem to be solved. There has been a corresponding rise of security solutions proposed by researchers, however, the current security mechanisms on lightweight mobile clients are proven to be fragile. Due to the fact that this research field is immature and still unexplored in-depth, with this paper, we aim to provide a structured and comprehensive study on privacy protection using trusted execution environment (TEE) for lightweight mobile clients. This paper presents a highly effective and secure lightweight mobile client privacy protection system that utilizes TEE to provide a new method for privacy protection. In particular, the prototype of Lightweight Mobile Clients Privacy Protection Using Trusted Execution Environments (LMCPTEE) is built using Intel software guard extensions (SGX) because SGX can guarantee the integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity of private data. By putting lightweight mobile client critical data on SGX, the security and privacy of client data can be greatly improved. We design the authentication mechanism and privacy protection strategy based on SGX to achieve hardware-enhanced data protection and make a trusted connection with the lightweight mobile clients, thus build the distributed trusted system architecture. The experiment demonstrates that without relying on the performance of the blockchain, the LMCPTEE is practical, feasible, low-performance overhead. It can guarantee the privacy and security of lightweight mobile client private data.