Historical insight into the development of Mobile TEEs

Today, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are ubiquitous in mobile devices from all major smartphone vendors. They first appeared in Nokia smartphones fifteen years ago. Around the turn of the century, Nokia engineers in Finland played a crucial role in developing mobile TEE technology and paving the way for its widespread deployment. But this important story is not widely known as there is limited public documentation. To address this gap of “missing history”, we carried out an oral history project during the spring of 2019. In this post, we summarize our findings.

Historical insight into TEEs

Trust in mobile devices is a prerequisite for the modern mobile industry ranging from e-commerce to social media. Customers, companies, and regulators need to trust the mobile phone with sensitive information such as credit card numbers and fingerprints. A trusted execution environment (TEE) — a secure area that runs a computing system in parallel with, but isolated from, the main operating system — is central to modern mobile security. Through creating technical conditions for different stakeholders to rely on the mobile system, it has been an essential component in the development of the modern mobile business in general. 

During the spring of 2019, the Secure Systems Group at Aalto University hosted an oral history project on the development of  mobile TEEs. The project focused on the role played by Nokia experts in the emergence and establishment of mobile TEEs. We conducted a series of interviews with fifteen key actors: senior directors and managers, researchers, and security professionals. The aim was to increase the understanding of the mobile platform security systems today and to recognize the human actors behind their development and widespread deployment.

The starting point in any historical inquiry is that technological development is never self-evident nor pre-determined, neither does it takes place in isolation. Instead, technological systems are developed by individuals at a certain place and time, restricted by different economic, technical, regulatory, and other factors. Understanding the development of the mobile secure execution system helps us to master it today and to improve it tomorrow.

Emergence of mobile security

Communication is imperative for modern societies. The history of telecommunication goes back centuries from visual signalling, e.g., the semaphore system to the electronic telegraph and radio transmission. A common theme in the history of telecommunication is that security follows the communication technology with a delay. In Finland, the first public mobile network, the Autoradiopuhelin (ARP) and the first generation Nordisk MobilTelefon (NMT) system transmitted analog voice signal originally without any cryptographic protection. Yet, the security of the device itself was hardly recognized as a critical problem before the 1990s. The primary reason for that was the strictly regulated operation: both ARP (launched in 1971) and NMT (1981) were operated by governmental organisations. Mobile phones themselves were closed systems with few extra capabilities compared with traditional landline phones: The bulky and heavy equipment were best protected by doors and locks.  

 

The 1990s revolutionized mobile telecommunication. First, the GSM standard addressed the communication security problem by encrypting the signal and protecting the air-interface. Second, the deregulation of telecommunication opened market for private companies which skyrocketed the number of operators within a short time. The physical dimensions of mobile handsets shrank, making them attractive targets for thieves. Finally, after the mid-1990s, support for third-party applications written in the Java programming language that could be downloaded from the Internet transformed phones rapidly from closed devices to open systems that increasingly started to resemble small, general-purpose computers. Resulting from more users, less governmental control over the industry, and more sources of potential vulnerabilities, device security emerged as a new problem in the design of mobile phones. 

The security of the phone under these new conditions referred merely to the integrity of the device: Regulators and mobile network operators came up with novel needs to protect certain pieces of information inside the phone from unauthorized changes after the phone left the assembly line. In particular, the regulators wanted a secure storage for the device identity (International Mobile Equipment Identity, IMEI) and for certain parameters such as those for radio frequency transmission, which could affect the safety of the phone and functionality of the mobile network. Mobile operators, which were the principal customers for Nokia, needed a strong subsidy lock mechanism (colloquially known as “SIM locks”) that would tie the phone to a certain operator for a predetermined time. 

Security of Nokia’s Digital Core Technology (DCT) generation phones was enforced with mainly software solutions and protected by secrecy within the organization: even security professionals had  little more than educated guesses about the structure and requirements of the DCT security architecture. The essential weakness of this kind of “security through obscurity” design is that after the secret designs are revealed, the protection is lost. The high market share of Nokia made it an attractive target for hackers. DCT4 generation brought in hardware component in the form of one-time-programmable memory but particularly in the case of the SIM locks, the economic motives to break the security system outstripped the technological capabilities to protect it. The profit losses of important customers increased pressures to design a better security architecture.  

Towards mobile platform security

The interest towards a coherent, hardware-enforced platform security stemmed from a team of engineers working with mobile payments and security. The initial idea was to introduce a separate security chip to implement physical isolation of security-critical processing. Yet, an additional hardware chip was deemed too expensive in the strictly cost-sensitive organization. At the turn of the millennium, a newly graduated engineer came up with an idea to implement a logically isolated security mode using just one chip. A new status bit was introduced in the processor, which determined the status of data stored in memory and whether or not the processor was in a secure mode. This “secure processor environment” design was adopted as the fundamental cornerstone of the next baseband generation: Baseband 5 (BB5). 

In the history of technology no technological innovations really emerge out of nowhere but  are always influenced by preceding ideas and inventions. Certain features of the secure environment, were decisively invented around already existing patents.  What was novel with Nokia’s solution was the combination of the software and hardware features to implement an architecture for mobile platform security which were deployed on a large-scale.

The launch of the first BB5 phone in 2004 was a major landmark in the development of Nokia’s mobile phones as it effectively ushered in the era of 3G phones. Less visible to the public but equally important was the changes introduced to the platform security model as a whole.     

First, it marked a switch from “security through obscurity” towards “security through transparency”. Open communication throughout the process, considerable level of transparency of the design, together with a public key infrastructure was required to develop a strong, usable, and cost-efficient security architecture. 

Second, security transformed from add-on feature into an integral part of the platform design. At the time when the early smartphones started to increasingly resemble general purpose computers in terms of their capabilities and function, the security engineers opted against following the PC world in the security design: instead of reactive firewalls and anti-virus tools, mobile security was better addressed proactively in the platform design.

Alliance of hardware and software

At the time when the secure processor environment was initiated, Nokia produced its own Radio Application Processor (RAP) chipsets. It simplified the efforts of making the hardware components to accommodate security requirements. Yet, the first BB5 phones were already equipped with Texas Instruments OMAP processors. Nokia and Texas Instruments had a close partnership which involved intense cooperation in chipset design. Later, Texas Instruments branded the technology as M-Shield. M-Shield stemmed from the same origin as  Nokia’s secure processor environment but was subsequently developed in a different direction. 

Around 2003, ARM proposed to develop a system-wide hardware isolation for secure execution for Nokia. Cooperation between ARM and Texas Instruments had its independent business goals separate from Nokia’s needs but it was also in Nokia’s interests. It provided Nokia with a possibility to implement a secure environment on any chip implementing ARM’s security architecture, which would later become known as ARM TrustZone. (A 2004 article is possibly the first public technical paper describing ARM TrustZone. At present, there is no official website hosting this article, but it appears to be stashed at this unofficial site).

Security as an enabler

A deep paradox in the development of security technology is that security is important to have but difficult to sell. The importance of security becomes apparent only when it does not work and its benefits for the business are rarely manifested by increased sales. In corporate management, security remained overshadowed by competition for customers’ satisfaction and optimization of global supply chains. Instead of a strategic R&D project, the secure processor environment proceeded as a technology-driven skunkworks of a handful of engineers  and researchers. The development of security technology outside the strategic spotlights was facilitated by Nokia’s organizational culture that granted technological experts with considerable room to maneuver. Also critical was that the security engineers successfully translated security from a problem into an enabler. E-commerce still remained a marginal use case at the beginning of the 2000s, SIM lock, IMEI protection, and later digital rights management (DRM) became the main business cases that justified the adjustment of the hardware and software architectures. 

Once the platform security architecture was accepted for product programs, hardware suppliers had adopted the secure processor environment in their designs, and complementary adjustments in manufacturing process and key distribution services were implemented, the security technology constituted an infrastructure for other applications and functions to take advantage of. These novel uses of the security infrastructure ranged from the rather trivial case of the protection of audio compression attributes of Nokia headphones to the widely influential use of security certificates for distinguishing among model variants during the manufacturing process.

Standardised trust

After the adoption of the hardware-enforced secure execution environment as a de facto internal standard, Nokia turned the attention onto the state-of-the art of mobile security standards in formal standards development organizations. Two prime rationales motivated the representatives of the company to take an active role in international standardization forums. First, an open standard that was revised in an international cooperation community, required no maintenance from Nokia, and was available for potential suppliers would facilitate competitive bidding in chipset production. Second, as the mobile standards were anyway going to take form in the future, Nokia wanted to make sure they would be compatible with the solution it had already adopted. 

At first, Nokia’s representatives chaired a mobile working group within Trusted Computing Group (TCG). Although being founded by PC companies, TCG was the only industrial forum working with hardware security standards for global use in the early 2000s. In 2007, TCG announced the first hardware security standard for mobile, Mobile Trusted Platform Module (mobile TPM, MTM), which became an ISO standard. It was different from Nokia’s secure processor environment but more importantly, it was compatible with it.

The concept of TEEs was first described publicly by Open Mobile TerminalPlatform (OMTP) in its specification for Advanced Trusted Environment in 2009. A while later, the center of TEE standardization became another industry forum, GlobalPlatform. With two industrial forums striving to standardize hardware-enforced mobile security, there was a risk that they would end up with mutually incompatible specifications. It was in Nokia’s interest to turn the forums from competitors into cooperators. In 2010, GlobalPlatform published its first TEE standard, TEE client API 1.0 that defines the communication between trusted applications which are executed in TEE, and applications executed by the main operating system. In 2012, GlobalPlatform and TCG announced the founding of a joint working group focusing on security topics.

After 2010, Nokia had less resources for extensive mobile device R&D projects or participation in international forums. Development of TEE technology continued even as Nokia's role in it diminished over time.  Today, TEE technology is widely deployed on mobile devices and is extensively used on both iOS and Android smartphones.

Some concluding remarks

History does not repeat itself. Lessons of past failures and success are not readily applicable in the future. Yet, historical insight into the development of mobile TEEs helps us to comprehend  comparable systems of today. In particular, despite the convergence between the PC and mobile worlds, the different approaches to platform security architecture still manifest the legacy of the past: The technological paths once taken create dependencies over time and continue shaping the framework in which the security engineers operate today. 

In addition, the constitutive role of only a few dedicated security professionals in just one company in the development and establishment of an international standard demonstrates the malleability of technological systems when they are still under construction. 

Finally, the concept of “security” resonates with the complex needs of authorities, customers, and users but translates into very different meanings for different stakeholders. Mobile security technology may protect the privacy of the user from corporations, or the business from its customers; it may also ensure the safety of the device or enable the law-enforcement to  access personal data in a lawful manner. Security technology is bound to the  interaction with its political, cultural, and economic environment and is always shaped by them.

The TEE-history project team:

Saara Matala, project researcher

Thomas Nyman, doctoral candidate

N. Asokan, professor

We interviewed fifteen former or current Nokia employees for this project: two senior executives, three managers, four researchers, and  six engineers. We thank them for being generous with their time and insights. Among them are:

• Timo Ali-Vehmas, Nokia
• Jan-Erik Ekberg, Huawei
• Janne Hirvimies, Darkmatter
• Antti Jauhiainen, ZoomIN Oy
• Antti Kiiveri, Boogie Software Oy
• Markku Kylänpää, VTT
• Meri Löfman, Brighthouse Intelligence Oy
• Janne Mäntylä, Huawei
• Yrjö Neuvo, Aalto University
• Valtteri Niemi, University of Helsinki
• Lauri Paatero, F-Secure
• Jukka Parkkinen, OP Financial Group
• Janne Takala, Profit Software Oy.
• Janne Uusilehto, Google