Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Practical

By Ferdinand Brasser, Urs Müller, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Kari Kostiainen, Srdjan Čapkun, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi. 2017

666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intel SGX isolates the memory of security-critical applications from the untrusted OS. However, it has been speculated that SGX may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks through shared caches. We developed new cache attack techniques customized for SGX. Our attack differs from other SGX cache attacks in that it is easy to deploy and avoids known detection approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack on two case studies: RSA decryption and genomic processing. While cache timing attacks against RSA and other cryptographic operations can be prevented by using appropriately hardened crypto libraries, the same cannot be easily done for other computations, such as genomic processing. Our second case study therefore shows that attacks on noncryptographic but privacy sensitive operations are a serious threat. We analyze countermeasures and show that none of the known defenses eliminates the attack.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Signal Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Slalom: Fast, Verifiable and Private Execution of Neural Networks in Trusted Hardware (2018, background): “In the past years, many attacks have been proposed, with the goal of undermining privacy of enclave computations (Xu et al., 2015; Brasser et al., 2017; Moghimi et al., 2017; Götzfried et al., 2017; Van Bulck et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2017).”
Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts (2018, neutral): “Although trusted hardware aims to protect confidentiality for TEE, recent work has uncovered data leakage via side-channel attacks [18, 38, 40, 46, 53, 54, 66, 70, 79, 91, 93].”
Occlumency: Privacy-preserving Remote Deep-learning Inference Using SGX (2019, background): “Prior studies suggested various sidechannel attacks to SGX applications (on memory management [75], and CPU cache [22, 30, 33]) although SGX provides strong confidentiality and integrity of codes and data.”
IRON: Functional Encryption using Intel SGX (2017, background): “For instance, several side-channel attacks have come to light since SGX’s initial release [13, 38, 52, 58, 59].”
Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution (2018, background): “Recent results include cross-core and cross-CPU attacks [37, 75], cloud-based attacks [32, 76], attacks on and from trusted execution environments [10, 44, 61], attacks from mobile code [23, 46, 51], and new attack techniques [11, 28, 44].”
SGX-Bomb: Locking Down the Processor via Rowhammer Attack (2017, background): “Many sidechannels attacks exploiting page fault [7, 32, 37], cache timing [6, 13, 16, 30], and branch prediction [24] have been proposed to attack SGX.”
Foreshadow: Extracting the Keys to the Intel SGX Kingdom with Transient Out-of-Order Execution (2018, neutral): “This property has recently been abused to mount stealthy SGX P RIME +P ROBE L1 cache side-channel attacks entirely from a co-resident logical processor, without interrupting the victim enclave [6,17,51].”
Towards Scaling Blockchain Systems via Sharding (2018, background): “This model admits recent side-channel attacks on SGX that leak enclave data [12].”
Survey of Attacks and Defenses on Edge-Deployed Neural Networks (2019, background): “of untrusted CPUs/GPUs, possible hardware Trojans, broken hardware defenses [69], etc.”
SGX-LKL: Securing the Host OS Interface for Trusted Execution (2019, background): “Cache side channel attacks [16,41,68] are not speciﬁc to TEEs because they are enabled by micro-architectural resource sharing.”
An Algorithmic Framework For Differentially Private Data Analysis on Trusted Processors (2018, background): “Memory access patterns have been shown to be sufficient to extract secrets and data from cryptographic code [34, 43, 10, 45, 42], from genome indexing algorithms [12], and from image and text applications [55].”
DeepAttest: An End-to-End Attestation Framework for Deep Neural Networks (2019, background): “identified to be vulnerable to side-channel attacks [6, 30].”
EnclaveDB: A Secure Database Using SGX (2018, background): “Side channels are a serious concern with trusted hardware [17], [18], [19], [20], and building efficient side channel protection for high performance systems like EnclaveDB remains an open problem.”
High-Resolution Side Channels for Untrusted Operating Systems (2017, methodology): “Several recent papers study cache side channels for enclaves using techniques that are different from ours and focusing primarily on crypto targets [12, 23, 40].”
Komodo: Using verification to disentangle secure-enclave hardware from software (2017, background): “Classic side-channel attacks exploit shared hardware resources such as caches, branch predictors and TLBs, and are not addressed by SGX [13, 76].”
Telling Your Secrets without Page Faults: Stealthy Page Table-Based Attacks on Enclaved Execution (2017, background): “Finally, between submission and publication of this paper, the SGX research community has witnessed a steady stream of microarchitectural side-channel attacks; either by abusing the branch prediction unit [28], or in the form of finegrained PRIME+PROBE [13, 37, 5, 33] cache attacks.”
ROTE: Rollback Protection for Trusted Execution (2017, background): “We consider information leakage from side-channel attacks a realistic threat [17, 18, 19], but an orthogonal problem to rollback attacks, and thus outside of our model.”
CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks (2017, background): “Several Cache attacks on SGX have recently and concurrently been shown, e.g. on AES [22] and RSA [12].”