Encrypted Data Processing

TL;DR

This paper introduces EDAP, a general-purpose architecture for confidential computing that ensures data privacy and integrity without burdening application developers or requiring system trust, with minimal performance impact.

Contribution

It presents a novel EDAP architecture that guarantees data confidentiality and authenticity in untrusted hardware environments without added developer or system overhead.

Findings

Average 6% performance slowdown with encryption engine placement

EDAP guarantees data confidentiality in untrusted hardware

Suitable for modern cloud confidential computing environments

Abstract

In this paper, we present a comprehensive architecture for confidential computing, which we show to be general purpose and quite efficient. It executes the application as is, without any added burden or discipline requirements from the application developers. Furthermore, it does not require the trust of system software at the computing server and does not impose any added burden on the communication subsystem. The proposed Encrypted Data Processing (EDAP) architecture accomplishes confidentiality, authenticity, and freshness of the key-based cryptographic data protection by adopting data encryption with a multi-level key protection scheme. It guarantees that the user data is visible only in non-privileged mode to a designated program trusted by the data owner on a designated hardware, thus protecting the data from an untrusted hardware, hypervisor, OS, or other users' applications. The cryptographic keys and protocols used for achieving these confidential computing requirements are described in a use case example. Encrypting and decrypting data in an EDAP-enabled processor can lead to performance degradation as it adds cycle time to the overall execution. However, our simulation result shows that the slowdown is only 6% on average across a collection of commercial workloads when the data encryption engine is placed between the L1 and L2 cache. We demonstrate that the EDAP architecture is valuable and practicable in the modern cloud environment for confidential computing. EDAP delivers a zero trust model of computing where the user software does not trust system software and vice versa.