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Confidential computing aims to secure the code and data in use by providing a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for applications using hardware features such as Intel SGX.Timing and cache side-channel attacks, however, are often outside the scope of the threat model, although once exploited they are able to break all the default security guarantees enforced by hardware. Unfortunately, tools detecting potential side-channel vulnerabilities within applications are limited and usually ignore the strong attack model and the unique programming model imposed by Intel SGX. This paper proposes a precise side-channel analysis tool, ENCIDER, detecting both timing and cache side-channel vulnerabilities within SGX applications via inferring potential timing observation points and incorporating the SGX programming model into analysis. ENCIDER uses dynamic symbolic execution to decompose the side-channel requirement based on the bounded non-interference property and implements byte-level information flow tracking via API modeling. We have applied ENCIDER to 4 real-world SGX applications, 2 SGX crypto libraries, and 3 widely-used crypto libraries, and found 29 timing side channels and 73 code and data cache side channels. We have reported our findings to the corresponding parties, e.g., Intel and ARM, who have confirmed most of the vulnerabilities detected.
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OBFUSCURO: A Commodity Obfuscation Engine on Intel SGX
Program obfuscation is a popular cryptographic construct with a wide range of uses such as IP theft prevention. Although cryptographic solutions for program obfuscation impose impractically high overheads, a recent breakthrough leveraging trusted hardware has shown promise. However, the existing solution is based on special-purpose trusted hardware, restricting its use-cases to a limited few. In this paper, we first study if such obfuscation is feasible based on commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, and we observe that certain important security considerations are not afforded by commodity hardware. In particular, we found that existing obfuscation/obliviousness schemes are insecure if directly applied to Intel SGX primarily due to side-channel limitations. To this end, we present OBFUSCURO, the first system providing program obfuscation using commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX. The key idea is to leverage ORAM operations to perform secure code execution and data access. Initially, OBFUSCURO transforms the regular program layout into a side-channel secure and ORAM-compatible layout. Then, OBFUSCURO ensures that its ORAM controller performs data oblivious accesses in order to protect itself from all memory-based side-channels. Furthermore, OBFUSCURO ensures that the program is secure from timing attacks by ensuring that the program always runs for a pre-configured time interval. Along the way, OBFUSCURO also introduces a systematic optimization such as register-based ORAM stash. We provide a thorough security analysis of OBFUSCURO along with empirical attack evaluations showing that OBFUSCURO can protect the SGX program execution from being leaked by access pattern-based and timing-based channels. We also provide a detailed performance benchmark results in order to show the practical aspects of OBFUSCURO.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1750809
- PAR ID:
- 10134884
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Network and Distributed System Security Symposium
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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