SGXBOUNDS: Memory Safety for Shielded Execution

By Dmitrii Kuvaiskii, O. Oleksenko, Sergei Arnautov, Bohdan Trach, Pramod Bhatotia, Pascal Felber, Christof Fetzer. 2017

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Shielded execution based on Intel SGX provides strong security guarantees for legacy applications running on untrusted platforms. However, memory safety attacks such as Heartbleed can render the confidentiality and integrity properties of shielded execution completely ineffective. To prevent these attacks, the state-of-the-art memory-safety approaches can be used in the context of shielded execution. In this work, we first showcase that two prominent software- and hardware-based defenses, AddressSanitizer and Intel MPX respectively, are impractical for shielded execution due to high performance and memory overheads. This motivated our design of SGXBounds---an efficient memory-safety approach for shielded execution exploiting the architectural features of Intel SGX. Our design is based on a simple combination of tagged pointers and compact memory layout. We implemented SGXBounds based on the LLVM compiler framework targeting unmodified multithreaded applications. Our evaluation using Phoenix, PARSEC, and RIPE benchmark suites shows that SGXBounds has performance and memory overheads of 17% and 0.1% respectively, while providing security guarantees similar to AddressSanitizer and Intel MPX. We have obtained similar results with SPEC CPU2006 and four real-world case studies: SQLite, Memcached, Apache, and Nginx.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Information Systems

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

1. Guoxing Chen
2. Sanchuan Chen
3. Donald E. Porter
4. Ten-Hwang Lai
5. Chia-che Tsai
6. Yuan Xiao
7. Mona Vij
8. Yinqian Zhang

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Ten-Hwang Lai

In Information Systems

1. Donald E. Porter
2. Chia-che Tsai
3. Mona Vij
4. Yinqian Zhang

Citations in the corpus

• POSTER: Rust SGX SDK: Towards Memory Safety in Intel SGX Enclave (2017, methodology): “Researchers have proposed several techniques for hardening Intel SGX [8, 11], but these solutions are only exploit mitigations.”
• Graphene-SGX: A Practical Library OS for Unmodified Applications on SGX (2017, methodology): “SGXBOUND [31] is a software technique for bounds-checking with low memory overheads, to fit within limited EPC size.”
• SgxPectre Attacks: Leaking Enclave Secrets via Speculative Execution (2018, background): “ion has encouraged researchers and practitioners to develop various new applications to utilize these features (e.g., [2, 22, 51, 54, 59, 68, 69, 85, 88]), and new software tools or frameworks (e.g., [4, 5, 9, 24, 43, 50, 61, 65, 67, 72, 80]) to help developers adopt this emerging programming paradi”
• SgxPectre: Stealing Intel Secrets from SGX Enclaves Via Speculative Execution (2018, background): “…encouraged researchers and practitioners to develop various new applications to utilize these features ( e.g. , [2, 22, 51, 54, 59, 68, 69, 85, 88]), and new software tools or frameworks ( e.g. , [4, 5, 9, 24, 43, 50, 61, 65, 67, 72, 80]) to help developers adopt this emerging programming paradigm.”