Mobile Phones in the Cloud-Edge Continuum: Understanding the TEE’s Role

Recent years have seen the cloud computing landscape shift from a centralized model, primarily based on large data centers, to a more distributed and heterogeneous architecture that incorporates edge and IoT units. This transition has given rise to the Cloud-Edge Continuum or Computing Continuum, effectively narrowing the gap between expansive data centers and end-user devices. This distributed computation requires the establishment of a chain of trust spanning from the cloud to the edge. A key enabling approach for building such trustworthy distributed infrastructure is exploiting Trusted Execution Environments. It is common to equate edge devices with IoT devices, nevertheless, a big fraction of such category is represented by mobile phones which have unique characteristics in the TEE usage strongly influenced by commercial logic. This research aims to analyze TEE-supported features available for users and developers of legacy mobile phones, also identifying their constraints and limitations.