Securing Access to Untrusted Services From TEEs with GateKeeper

TL;DR

GateKeeper is a framework that leverages formal models and testing to automatically generate runtime validators and vulnerability checkers, enhancing security for applications in TEEs against untrusted external services.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to model untrusted services using testing suites, enabling automatic generation of security validators and vulnerability checkers without requiring formal methods expertise.

Findings

Successfully protected Memcached and SQLite with negligible overheads.

Generated vulnerability checker detected novel vulnerabilities.

Developed comprehensive models of POSIX file system and OS primitives.

Abstract

Applications running in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) commonly use untrusted external services such as host File System. Adversaries may maliciously alter the normal service behavior to trigger subtle application bugs that would have never occurred under correct service operation, causing data leaks and integrity violations. Unfortunately, existing manual protections are incomplete and ad-hoc, whereas formally-verified ones require special expertise. We introduce GateKeeper, a framework to develop mitigations and vulnerability checkers for such attacks by leveraging lightweight formal models of untrusted services. With the attack seen as a violation of a services' functional correctness, GateKeeper takes a novel approach to develop a comprehensive model of a service without requiring formal methods expertise. We harness available testing suites routinely used in service development to tighten the model to known correct service implementation. GateKeeper uses the resulting model to automatically generate (1) a correct-by-construction runtime service validator in C that is linked with a trusted application and guards each service invocation to conform to the model; and (2) a targeted model-driven vulnerability checker for analyzing black-box applications. We evaluate GateKeeper on Intel SGX enclaves. We develop comprehensive models of a POSIX file system and OS synchronization primitives while using thousands of existing test suites to tighten their models to the actual Linux implementations. We generate the validator and integrate it with Graphene-SGX, and successfully protect unmodified Memcached and SQLite with negligible overheads. The generated vulnerability checker detects novel vulnerabilities in the Graphene-SGX protection layer and production applications.