Styx: Collaborative and Private Data Processing With TEE-Enforced Sticky Policy

TL;DR

Styx is a framework that combines sticky policies with Trusted Execution Environments to enable secure, privacy-preserving, and policy-compliant collaborative data processing and AI training.

Contribution

It introduces a novel TEE-based middleware with a programming language runtime for flexible, data-specific policy enforcement throughout data lifecycle and derivation.

Findings

Styx effectively enforces policies during data processing and collaboration.

The implementation demonstrates reasonable performance overheads.

Styx scales from single-node to large distributed deployments.

Abstract

Protecting sensitive information in data-driven collaborations, such as AI training, while meeting the diverse requirements of multiple mutually distrusted stakeholders, is both crucial and challenging. This paper presents Styx, a novel framework to address this challenge by integrating sticky policies with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). At a high level, Styx employs a hardware-TEE-protected middleware with a programming language runtime to form a sandboxed environment for both the data processing and policy enforcement. We carefully designed a data processing workflow and pipelines to enable a strong yet flexible data-specific policy enforcement throughout the entire data lifecycle and data derivation to achieve data-in-use protection, data lifecycle protection and dynamic collaboration. We implemented Styx and demonstrated its ability to make collaborative computing, such as joint AI training, more secure, privacy-preserving, and policy-compliant. Our evaluation shows the performance overheads imposed by Styx are reasonable on single-node computation with the capability to scale to a large distributed multi-node deployment.