End-to-End Security for Distributed Event-Driven Enclave Applications on Heterogeneous TEEs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source framework enabling secure, authenticated, and optionally confidential distributed event-driven applications across heterogeneous Trusted Execution Environments, supporting high-level programming and broad use cases.

Contribution

It extends TEE primitives to guarantee authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality, and provides a high-level development framework for heterogeneous TEEs including Intel SGX, TrustZone, and Sancus.

Findings

Framework ensures application authenticity and integrity.

Supports heterogeneous TEEs with high-level programming.

Suitable for industrial, IoT, and edge computing applications.

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to provide strong assurance of the secure execution of distributed event-driven applications on shared infrastructures, while relying on a small Trusted Computing Base. We build upon and extend security primitives provided by Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to guarantee authenticity and integrity properties of applications, and to secure control of input and output devices. More specifically, we guarantee that if an output is produced by the application, it was allowed to be produced by the application's source code based on an authentic trace of inputs. We present an integrated open-source framework to develop, deploy, and use such applications across heterogeneous TEEs. Beyond authenticity and integrity, our framework optionally provides confidentiality and a notion of availability, and facilitates software development at a high level of abstraction over the platform-specific TEE layer. We support event-driven programming to develop distributed enclave applications in Rust and C for heterogeneous TEE, including Intel SGX, ARM TrustZone and Sancus. In this article we discuss the workings of our approach, the extensions we made to the Sancus processor, and the integration of our development model with commercial TEEs. Our evaluation of security and performance aspects show that TEEs, together with our programming model, form a basis for powerful security architectures for dependable systems in domains such as Industrial Control Systems and the Internet of Things, illustrating our framework's unique suitability for a broad range of use cases which combine cloud processing, mobile and edge devices, and lightweight sensing and actuation.