Trust Beyond Border: Lightweight, Verifiable User Isolation for Protecting In-Enclave Services

Wenhao Wang, Weijie Liu, Hongbo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, Hongliang Tian, Dongdai Lin

Abstract: Due to the absence of in-enclave isolation, today's trusted execution environment (TEE), specifically Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), does not have the capability to securely run different users’ tasks within a single enclave, which is required for supporting real-world services, such as an in-enclave machine learning model that classifies the data from various sources, or a microservice (e.g., data search) that performs a very small task (within sub-seconds) for a user and therefore cannot afford the resources and the delay for creating a separate enclave for each user. To address this challenge, we developed Liveries, a technique that enables lightweight, verifiable in-enclave user isolation for protecting time-sharing services. Our approach restricts an in-enclave thread's privilege when configuring an enclave, and further performs integrity check and sanitization on critical enclave data upon user switches. For this purpose, we developed a novel technique that ensures the protection of sensitive user data (e.g., session keys) even in the presence of the adversary who may have compromised the enclave. Our study shows that the new technique is lightweight (1% overhead) and verifiable (about 3200 lines of code), making a step towards assured protection of real-world in-enclave services.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/tdsc.2021.3138427