In the realm of mobile security, where OS-based protections have proven insufficient against robust attackers, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have emerged as a hardware-based security technology. Despite the industry’s persistence in advancing TEE technology, the impact on end users and developers remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this gap by conducting a large-scale analysis of TEE utilization in Android applications, focusing on the key areas of cryptography, digital rights management, biometric authentication, and secure dialogs.

In systems security Trusted Execution Environments have been developed as a mean to offer additional security to existing complex system designs. In the past multiple vulnerabilities have affected TEE implementations like ARM TrustZone and Intel SGX, which is why the research community has been looking to identify and solve existing design flaws. Another branch of computer science looks at RISC-V, a modern processor architecture that allows everyone to use and extend it.

In mobile security research, one of the many challenges is the lack of trusted user interfaces (TUI). Currently, users are not able to reliably identify which screen content is genuine and which is potentially manipulated. The concepts of trusted displays and user interfaces, which offer a high confidence in the trustworthiness of screen contents, are not universally implemented on current consumer devices. In this paper, we systematically analyze the developments in the field of TUIs on mobile devices over seven years. We present a new taxonomy to define and categorize challenges and issues in current UI designs, with a focus on issues that negatively affect the security of the whole OS. In addition, we suggest directions where contributions in research could solve these issues.