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International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology

Inscrypt 2020: Information Security and Cryptology pp 221–243Cite as

E-SGX: Effective Cache Side-Channel Protection for Intel SGX on Untrusted OS

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12612))

Abstract

Cache side-channels are among the major weaknesses of Intel SGX. We mitigate this weakness with E-SGX, an effective defensive approach against all known access-driven/trace-driven cache side-channel attacks from privileged code. The core idea of E-SGX is to monopolize the whole CPU during security-critical executions, breaking the concurrent execution condition of access-driven/trace-driven cache side-channel attacks. To achieve this, E-SGX employs several SGX threads within the same enclave: one application thread and a few dummy threads together hold all CPU cores. A key challenge is to ensure all those enclave threads are scheduled exclusively to occupy all CPU cores with an untrusted OS scheduler. E-SGX addresses this challenge by providing effective mechanisms to detect violations of exclusive scheduling: challenge-response check of dummy threads aliveness and detection of asynchronous enclave exits, both performed with a carefully selected period. Comparing to existing approaches, E-SGX is capable of defending against access-driven/trace-driven cache side-channel attacks not only from the sibling logical core but from across all physical cores.

This work was supported by National Cryptography Development Fund (Award No. MMJJ20180221) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61772518).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100089, China

    Fan Lang, Wei Wang & Qiongxiao Wang

  2. School of Cyber Security, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, Anhui, China

    Jingqiang Lin

  3. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100089, China

    Fan Lang, Wei Wang, Jingqiang Lin & Qiongxiao Wang

  4. Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China

    Huorong Li

  5. SUSTech, Shenzhen, China

    Fengwei Zhang

  6. Ant Financial Services Group, Hangzhou, China

    Wuqiong Pan

Authors
  1. Fan Lang
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  2. Huorong Li
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  3. Wei Wang
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  4. Jingqiang Lin
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  7. Qiongxiao Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wei Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

    Yongdong Wu

  2. Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Moti Yung

A Implementation Code

A Implementation Code

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Lang, F. et al. (2021). E-SGX: Effective Cache Side-Channel Protection for Intel SGX on Untrusted OS. In: Wu, Y., Yung, M. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology. Inscrypt 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12612. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71852-7_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71852-7_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71852-7

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