AccScience Publishing / IJOCTA / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/IJOCTA025140070
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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Advancing IoT edge device security: A novel approach integrating lightweight virtualization and trusted execution environments with performance optimization

Ramakrishna Goli1 ,  Aravindhan Alagarsamy1* ,  Kumar Sureshkumar1 ,  Sundarakannan Mahilmaran2 ,  Gian Carlo Cardarilli3
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1 Centre for Multi-Core Architecture Computation (C-MAC), Department of ECE, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Vaddeswaram, AP, India
2 Department of Mathematics, Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
3 Department of Electronics Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico, Roma, Italy
IJOCTA, 025140070 https://doi.org/10.36922/IJOCTA025140070
Received: 3 April 2025 | Revised: 11 September 2025 | Accepted: 18 September 2025 | Published online: 16 October 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
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Abstract

As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, securing IoT edge devices has become increasingly critical, with threats becoming more sophisticated and frequent. This paper presents a novel security architecture that integrates Lightweight Virtualization (LV) with enhanced Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), designed specifically to strengthen the security of IoT edge devices. Using ARM TrustZone technology, the proposed approach creates a secure execution environment capable of meeting the real-time performance requirements of industrial IoT applications. The architecture provides end-to-end security through embedded virtualization and trust mechanisms, ensuring protection from hardware to application layers and reducing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. Results from rigorous experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed architecture compared to existing security frameworks. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach offers a 40.93% average latency reduction over existing methods. Furthermore, the proposed approach offers a 19.19% average throughput improvement and a 33.65% reduction in average energy over existing methods.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
IoT security
Lightweight virtualization
Trusted execution environments
Optimization
Funding
The first three authors thank DST-FIST for funding the lab facility for supporting this research under grant number SR/FST/ET-II/2019/450.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this article.
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An International Journal of Optimization and Control: Theories & Applications, Electronic ISSN: 2146-5703 Print ISSN: 2146-0957, Published by AccScience Publishing
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