A Survey of Published Attacks on Intel SGX

TL;DR

This paper surveys known attacks on Intel SGX, categorizing them by implementation and examining existing defenses, providing a comprehensive overview of vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies for this trusted execution environment.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive categorization of SGX-specific attacks and reviews current defense mechanisms, aiding future research and security improvements.

Findings

Seven categories of SGX attacks identified

Various mitigation strategies analyzed and categorized

Highlights gaps in current defenses

Abstract

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provides a trusted execution environment (TEE) to run code and operate sensitive data. SGX provides runtime hardware protection where both code and data are protected even if other code components are malicious. However, recently many attacks targeting SGX have been identified and introduced that can thwart the hardware defence provided by SGX. In this paper we present a survey of all attacks specifically targeting Intel SGX that are known to the authors, to date. We categorized the attacks based on their implementation details into 7 different categories. We also look into the available defence mechanisms against identified attacks and categorize the available types of mitigations for each presented attack.