Towards Efficiently Establishing Mutual Distrust Between Host Application and Enclave for SGX

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel system that enforces mutual distrust between host applications and enclaves in SGX, preventing malicious enclave behaviors with minimal performance overhead.

Contribution

It presents an efficient mechanism using Intel MPK and x86 debugging to confine untrusted enclaves, addressing a critical security gap in SGX systems.

Findings

Achieves less than 4% performance overhead

Successfully constrains malicious enclave actions

Demonstrates effectiveness with real-world applications

Abstract

Since its debut, SGX has been used in many applications, e.g., secure data processing. However, previous systems usually assume a trusted enclave and ignore the security issues caused by an untrusted enclave. For instance, a vulnerable (or even malicious) third-party enclave can be exploited to attack the host application and the rest of the system. In this paper, we propose an efficient mechanism to confine an untrusted enclave's behaviors. The threats of an untrusted enclave come from the enclave-host asymmetries. They can be abused to access arbitrary memory regions of its host application, jump to any code location after leaving the enclave and forge the stack register to manipulate the saved context. Our solution breaks such asymmetries and establishes mutual distrust between the host application and the enclave. It leverages Intel MPK for efficient memory isolation and the x86 single-step debugging mechanism to capture the event when an enclave is existing. It then performs the integrity check for the jump target and the stack pointer. We have solved two practical challenges and implemented a prototype system. The evaluation with multiple micro-benchmarks and representative real-world applications demonstrated the efficiency of our system, with less than 4% performance overhead.