# Stress-SGX: Load and Stress your Enclaves for Fun and Profit

## TL;DR

Stress-SGX is a tool designed to evaluate the performance and limitations of Intel SGX enclaves by applying stress tests and analyzing different SGX-enabled systems.

## Contribution

The paper introduces Stress-SGX, a specialized stress-testing tool for SGX enclaves, and provides insights on porting legacy code and performance comparison across machines.

## Key findings

- Identified limitations in SGX enclave performance
- Provided insights on porting legacy code to SGX
- Compared performance across multiple SGX-enabled systems

## Abstract

The latest generation of Intel processors supports Software Guard Extensions (SGX), a set of instructions that implements a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) right inside the CPU, by means of so-called enclaves. This paper presents Stress-SGX, an easy-to-use stress-test tool to evaluate the performance of SGX-enabled nodes. We build on top of the popular Stress-NG tool, while only keeping the workload injectors (stressors) that are meaningful in the SGX context. We report on several insights and lessons learned about porting legacy code to run inside an SGX enclave, as well as the limitations introduced by this process. Finally, we use Stress-SGX to conduct a study comparing the performance of different SGX-enabled machines.