TEE-X: TEE-aware Acceleration Framework for Large Vision Models at the Edge

Despite their remarkable success, machine learning models, particularly in vision applications, are alarmingly vulnerable to a range of security threats. One key factor in the attack landscape is the distinction between white-box and black-box threat models, as the latter poses challenges that limit attack effectiveness when access to model information is limited. As a result, using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) enhances security for machine learning applications by protecting model confidentiality and execution integrity, effectively shifting the execution environment from the white-box to the black-box side of the threat model spectrum. While adopting TEEs for large vision models, e.g., Vision Transformers (ViTs), is crucial for enhancing security and privacy, significant challenges related to memory constraints and increased computational latency must be addressed, especially in time-sensitive edge applications where safety and privacy are paramount. The objective of this work is to enable large vision models to be fully hosted within TEEs, achieving GPU-level inference latency for time-sensitive edge vision applications while maintaining performance. To this end, we propose TEE-X, a TEE-aware acceleration framework that introduces a sensitivity-aware modularization technique and enables vectorization in TEE inference. This design is validated on OP-TEE for Arm TrustZone, configured to optimize performance on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier for efficient edge vision applications using ViT models. The findings reveal that TEE-X delivers an effective TEE-aware acceleration framework that achieves minimal accuracy-latency trade-offs while ensuring fast and secure edge inference for vision models.

TITAN-FedAnil+: Trust-Based Adaptive Blockchain Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained Intelligent Enterprises

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for collaborative intelligence while preserving data privacy. However, data heterogeneity arising from non-IID distributions and decentralized security threats remain significant challenges, particularly in resource-constrained enterprise environments. This paper presents TITAN-FedAnil+, a Trust-Based Adaptive Network for blockchain-enabled federated learning in intelligent enterprises. The proposed framework introduces affinity propagation-based adaptive clustered aggregation to identify and filter malicious updates without requiring prior knowledge of the number of attackers. In addition, GPU-accelerated vectorization is employed to improve computational efficiency, while a signed state jump mechanism enables lightweight blockchain resynchronization. Experimental results demonstrate substantial reductions in memory overhead, achieving up to 81% savings across 50 communication rounds on constrained 8 GB edge devices compared with the baseline framework. The results indicate that TITAN-FedAnil+ effectively improves robustness, scalability, and resource efficiency for secure federated learning deployments in intelligent enterprise environments.