CAREER: Taming the Side-Channel Hazards in the Shielded Execution Paradigm

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Intel's Software Guard Extension (SGX) is a hardware extension available in recent Intel processors, which provides software applications with shielded execution environments, called enclaves, to protect their confidentiality and integrity against compromised operating systems. The wide adoption of SGX will foster a shielded execution paradigm for enhancing software security in situations where the operating systems are not entirely trusted, such as public clouds. However, recent studies have suggested that SGX is vulnerable to side-channel threats, in which the system software measures the enclaves' use of system resources or micro-architectural resources to infer their secrets. Such a threat will significantly imperil the potential positive impacts that SGX could bring to the society, such as protecting software intellectual property and securely distributing and processing secret data.This research aims to address the side-channel hazards in SGX and advance the field in two aspects: First, it will develop novel principles and techniques to detect vulnerabilities in enclave programs, by modeling side-channel vulnerabilities and differentially analyzing their memory access patterns according to the model specification. Second, it will enhance enclave programs to thwart side-channel attacks at runtime by leveraging novel Timed Execution techniques and/or Address Space Layout Obfuscation mechanisms. The research will not only push forward the frontier of side-channel studies, but have broader societal impacts in the following aspects: First, because side-channels are major security concerns of security-critical applications to which shielded execution is the most valuable, the project will accelerate the broader acceptance of the shielded execution paradigm and the SGX technology. Second, through a set of educational tasks, the project will promote awareness of side-channel hazards to students, researchers, industry partners, and the general public, and hence motivate the adoption of the side-channel defense techniques in real-world applications.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.