SECURE EMBEDDED NETWORKING ARCHITECTURES USING TRUSTED EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS IN BROADBAND GATEWAYS

Abstract

Broadband gateways serve as critical network perimeters connecting home and enterprise environments to the internet, yet traditional gateway architectures lack robust security isolation for sensitive operations like cryptographic key management, firmware validation, and secure device onboarding. This research presents a comprehensive security architecture leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to establish hardware-backed security foundations in embedded broadband gateways. Our implementation integrates OP-TEE (Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment) on ARM TrustZone-enabled gateway platforms, establishing secure boot chains, trusted firmware components, and cryptographic isolation for critical networking functions. The architecture addresses practical security challenges in gateway deployments including secure EasyMesh network formation, protected credential storage, and isolated firmware update verification. We demonstrate how TEE-based isolation protects against both remote network attacks and local exploitation attempts that compromise traditional Linux-based gateways. Experimental validation across multiple gateway platforms shows the security enhancements impose minimal performance overhead—less than 8% throughput reduction and 12ms latency increase—while providing strong guarantees against broad attack classes including memory corruption, privilege escalation, and persistent rootkit installation. This work contributes both architectural principles for secure embedded networking and practical implementation guidance for deploying TEE-based security in resource-constrained gateway hardware.