Speculative-execution attacks, such as SgxSpectre, Foreshadow, and MDS attacks, leverage recently disclosed CPU hardware vulnerabilities and micro-architectural side channels to breach the confidentiality and integrity of Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX). Unlike traditional micro-architectural side-channel attacks, speculative-execution attacks extract any data in the enclave memory, which makes them very challenging to defeat purely from the software. However, to date, Intel has not completely mitigated the threats of speculative-execution attacks from the hardware. Hence, future attack variants may emerge. This paper proposes a software-based solution to speculative-execution attacks, even with the strong assumption that confidentiality of enclave memory is compromised. Our solution extends an existing work called HyperRace, which is a compiler-assisted tool for detecting Hyper-Threading based side-channel attacks against SGX enclaves, to thwart speculative-execution attacks from within SGX enclaves. It requires supports from the untrusted operating system, e.g., for temporarily disabling interrupts, but verifies the OS's behaviors. Additional microcode upgrades are required from Intel to secure the attestation flow.
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This content will become publicly available on October 30, 2024
Building GPU TEEs using CPU Secure Enclaves with GEVisor
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) have been proposed to protect GPU computation for machine learning applications operating on sensitive data. However, existing GPU TEE solutions either require CPU and/or GPU hardware modification to realize TEEs for GPUs, which prevents current systems from adopting them, or rely on untrusted system software such as GPU device drivers. In this paper, we propose using CPU secure enclaves, e.g., Intel SGX, to build GPU TEEs without modifications to existing hardware. To tackle the fundamental limitations of these enclaves, such as no support for I/O operations, we design and develop GEVisor, a formally verified security reference monitor software to enable a trusted I/O path between enclaves and GPU without trusting the GPU device driver. GEVisor operates in the Virtual Machine Extension (VMX) root mode, monitors the host system software to prevent unauthorized access to the GPU code and data outside the enclave, and isolates the enclave GPU context from other contexts during GPU computation. We implement and evaluate GEVisor on a commodity machine with an Intel SGX CPU and an NVIDIA Pascal GPU. Our experimental results show that our approach maintains an average overhead of 13.1% for deep learning and 18% for GPU benchmarks compared to native GPU computation while providing GPU TEEs for existing CPU and GPU hardware.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2145744
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10472303
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 249 to 264
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Santa Cruz CA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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