Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) protects the confidentiality and integrity of an unprivileged program running inside a secure enclave from a privileged attacker who has full control of the entire operating system (OS). Program execution inside this enclave is therefore referred to as shielded. Unfortunately, shielded execution does not protect programs from side-channel attacks by a privileged attacker. For instance, it has been shown that by changing page table entries of memory pages used by shielded execution, a malicious OS kernel could observe memory page accesses from the execution and hence infer a wide range of sensitive information about it. In fact, this page-fault side channel is only an instance of a category of side-channel attacks, here called privileged side-channel attacks, in which privileged attackers frequently preempt the shielded execution to obtain fine-grained side-channel observations. In this paper, we present Déjà Vu, a software framework that enables a shielded execution to detect such privileged side-channel attacks. Specifically, we build into shielded execution the ability to check program execution time at the granularity of paths in its control-flow graph. To provide a trustworthy source of time measurement, Déjà Vu implements a novel software reference clock that is protected by Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), a hardware implementation of transactional memory. Evaluations show that Déjà Vu effectively detects side-channel attacks against shielded execution and against the reference clock itself.
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This content will become publicly available on August 9, 2024
VIPER: Spotting Syscall-Guard Variables for Data-Only Attacks
As control-flow protection techniques are widely deployed, it is difficult for attackers to modify control data, like function pointers, to hijack program control flow. Instead, data-only attacks corrupt security-critical non-control data (critical data), and can bypass all control-flow protections to revive severe attacks. Previous works have explored various methods to help construct or prevent data-only attacks. However, no solution can automatically detect program-specific critical data.
In this paper, we identify an important category of critical data, syscall-guard variables, and propose a set of solutions to automatically detect such variables in a scalable manner. Syscall-guard variables determine to invoke security-related system calls (syscalls), and altering them will allow attackers to request extra privileges from the operating system. We propose branch force, which intentionally flips every conditional branch during the execution and checks whether new security-related syscalls are invoked. If so, we conduct data-flow analysis to estimate the feasibility to flip such branches through common memory errors. We build a tool, VIPER, to implement our ideas. VIPER successfully detects 34 previously unknown syscall-guard variables from 13 programs. We build four new data-only attacks on sqlite and v8, which execute arbitrary command or delete arbitrary file. VIPER completes its analysis within five minutes for most programs, showing its practicality for spotting syscall-guard variables.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2247652
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10451801
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2023)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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