# Minimum Viable Device Drivers for ARM TrustZone

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08303 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08303/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [D2MoE: Dual Routing and Dynamic Scheduling for Efficient On-Device MoE-based LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15299/) (2025)
- [STI: Turbocharge NLP Inference at the Edge via Elastic Pipelining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05022/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While TrustZone can isolate IO hardware, it lacks drivers for modern IO devices. Rather than porting drivers, we propose a novel approach to deriving minimum viable drivers: developers exercise a full driver and record the driver/device interactions; the processed recordings, dubbed driverlets, are replayed in the TEE at run time to access IO devices. Driverlets address two key challenges: correctness and expressiveness, for which they build on a key construct called interaction template. The interaction template ensures faithful reproduction of recorded IO jobs (albeit on new IO data); it accepts dynamic input values; it tolerates nondeterministic device behaviors. We demonstrate driverlets on a series of sophisticated devices, making them accessible to TrustZone for the first time to our knowledge. Our experiments show that driverlets are secure, easy to build, and incur acceptable overhead (1.4x -2.7x compared to native drivers). Driverlets fill a critical gap in the TrustZone TEE, realizing its long-promised vision of secure IO.