SmartZone: Runtime Support for Secure and Efficient On-Device Inference on ARM TrustZone

On-device inference is a burgeoning paradigm that performs model inference locally on end devices, allowing private data to remain local. ARM TrustZone as a widely supported trusted execution environment has been applied to provide confidentiality protection for on-device inference. However, with the rise of large-scale models like large language models (LLMs), TrustZone-based on-device inference faces challenges in migration difficulties and inefficient execution. The rudimentary TEE OS on TrustZone lacks both the inference runtime needed for building models and the parallel support necessary to accelerate inference. Moreover, the limited secure memory resources on end devices further constrain the model size and degrade performance. In this paper, we propose SmartZone to provide runtime support for secure and efficient on-device inference on TrustZone. SmartZone consists three main components: (1) a trusted inference-oriented operator set, providing the underlying mechanisms adapted to the TrustZone’s execution mode for trusted inference of DNN models and LLMs. (2) the proactive multi-threading parallel support, which increases the number of CPU cores in the secure state via cross-world thread collaboration to achieve parallelism, and (3) the on-demand secure memory management method, which statically allocates the appropriate secure memory size based on pre-execution resource analysis. We implement a prototype of SmartZone on the Raspberry Pi 3B+ board and evaluate it on four well-known DNN models and llama2 LLM. Extensive experimental results show that SmartZone provides end-to-end protection for on-device inference while maintaining excellent performance. Compared to the origin trusted inference, SmartZone accelerates the inference speed by up to 4.26× and reduces energy consumption by 65.81%.