vSGX: Virtualizing SGX Enclaves on AMD SEV

Shixuan Zhao, Mengyuan Li, Yinqian Zhang, Zhiqiang Lin

Abstract: The growing need of trusted execution environment (TEE) has boomed the development of hardware enclaves. However, current TEEs and their applications are tightly bound to the hardware implementation, hindering their compatibility across different platforms. This paper presents vSGX, a novel system to virtualize the execution of an Intel SGX enclave atop AMD SEV. The key idea is to interpose the execution of enclave instructions transparently to support the SGX ISA extensions, consolidate encrypted virtual memory of separated SEV virtual machines to create a single virtualized SGX-like address space, and provide attestations for the authenticity of the TEE and the integrity of enclave software with a trust chain rooted in the SEV hardware. By design, vSGX achieves a comparable level of security guarantees on SEV as that on Intel SGX. We have implemented vSGX and demonstrated it imposes reasonable performance overhead for SGX enclave execution.