Detecting Privileged Side-Channel Attacks in Shielded Execution with Déjà Vu

By Sanchuan Chen, Xiaokuan Zhang, Michael K. Reiter, Yinqian Zhang. 2017

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) protects the confidentiality and integrity of an unprivileged program running inside a secure enclave from a privileged attacker who has full control of the entire operating system (OS). Program execution inside this enclave is therefore referred to as shielded. Unfortunately, shielded execution does not protect programs from side-channel attacks by a privileged attacker. For instance, it has been shown that by changing page table entries of memory pages used by shielded execution, a malicious OS kernel could observe memory page accesses from the execution and hence infer a wide range of sensitive information about it. In fact, this page-fault side channel is only an instance of a category of side-channel attacks, here called privileged side-channel attacks, in which privileged attackers frequently preempt the shielded execution to obtain fine-grained side-channel observations. In this paper, we present Deja Vu, a software framework that enables a shielded execution to detect such privileged side-channel attacks. Specifically, we build into shielded execution the ability to check program execution time at the granularity of paths in its control-flow graph. To provide a trustworthy source of time measurement, Deja Vu implements a novel software reference clock that is protected by Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), a hardware implementation of transactional memory. Evaluations show that Deja Vu effectively detects side-channel attacks against shielded execution and against the reference clock itself.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Signal Processing

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Computer Networks and Communications

In Signal Processing

Citations in the corpus

Slalom: Fast, Verifiable and Private Execution of Neural Networks in Trusted Hardware (2018, background): “Mitigations for these side-channel attacks are being developed (Shinde et al., 2016; Shih et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2017; Intel Corp., 2018) but a truly secure solution might require some architectural changes, e.g., as in the proposed Sanctum processor (Costan et al., 2016).”
Telling Your Secrets without Page Faults: Stealthy Page Table-Based Attacks on Enclaved Execution (2017, background): “Indeed, Déjà Vu [7], which was first published after we submitted this work, explores the use of TSX to construct an in-enclave reference clock thread that cannot be silently stopped by the OS.”
Chiron: Privacy-preserving Machine Learning as a Service (2018, background): “, transactional memory support, to detect and prevent privileged software from attacking enclaves [32, 55].”
Leaky Cauldron on the Dark Land: Understanding Memory Side-Channel Hazards in SGX (2017, methodology): “terms of their AEX frequency (which are used by the prior research to detect page side-channel attacks [34], [14]), we ran the page-fault attack, B-SPM and T-SPM against the latest version of Libgcrypt (v1.”
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.”
SgxPectre Attacks: Leaking Enclave Secrets via Speculative Execution (2018, background): “am;they are not applicablein the detectionof the gadgets used in our attacks. Third, detecting page-fault attacks or interrupt-based attacks against SGX enclave usingIntel’shardwaretransactionalmemory[61,16,24]. These approaches can be used to detect frequent AEX. But they do not prevent SGXPECTRE A”
SgxPectre: Stealing Intel Secrets from SGX Enclaves Via Speculative Execution (2018, background): “am;they are not applicablein the detectionof the gadgets used in our attacks. Third, detecting page-fault attacks or interrupt-based attacks against SGX enclave usingIntel’shardwaretransactionalmemory[61,16,24]. These approaches can be used to detect frequent AEX. But they do not prevent SGXPECTRE A”
Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Practical (2017, methodology): “A promising system-level approach is to detect when the OS is intervening with enclave execution as done in TSGX [46] and Déjá Vu [10].”
Graviton: Trusted Execution Environments on GPUs (2018, background): “Side channels are a serious concern with trusted hardware [10, 12, 22, 38, 45, 50] and building efficient counter measures remains an open problem.”
CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks (2017, background): “An enclave-to-enclave attack through LLC in a different adversarial scenario [46], as well as methods to detect privileged side-channel attacks from within an enclave [16] have concurrently been proposed.”
This Paper Is Included in the Proceedings of the 12th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (osdi '16). Ryoan: a Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data Ryoan: a Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data (unknown): “System calls in the application transfer con-trol to the NaCl runtime which determines the proper action.”