The Real Menace of Cloning Attacks on SGX Applications

TL;DR

This paper investigates cloning attacks on SGX applications, revealing that about 20% of proposals are vulnerable despite some using countermeasures against rollback attacks, highlighting a significant security gap.

Contribution

The study provides a comprehensive analysis of cloning attack vulnerabilities in 72 SGX-based proposals, emphasizing the need for improved defenses against cloning.

Findings

Approximately 20% of proposals are vulnerable to cloning attacks.

Some applications using monotonic counters remain insecure against cloning.

Cloning attacks pose a significant threat even when rollback protections are in place.

Abstract

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are gaining popularity as an effective means to provide confidentiality in the cloud. TEEs, such as Intel SGX, suffer from so-called rollback and cloning attacks (often referred to as forking attacks). Rollback attacks are enabled by the lack of freshness guarantees for sealed data; cloning attacks stem from the inability to determine if other instances of an enclave are running on the same platform. While rollback attacks have been extensively studied by the community, cloning attacks have been, unfortunately, less investigated. To address this gap, we extensively study and thoroughly analyze the susceptibility of 72 SGX-based proposals to cloning attacks. Our results show that roughly 20% of the analyzed proposals are insecure against cloning attacks-including those applications that rely on monotonic counters and are, therefore, secure against rollback attacks.