Abstract
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a recent technology from Intel that makes it possible to execute security-critical parts of an application in a so-called SGX enclave, an isolated area of the system that is shielded from all other software (including the OS and/or hypervisor). SGX was designed with the objective of making it relatively straightforward to take a single module of an existing C application, and put that module in an enclave. The SGX SDK includes tooling to semi-automatically generate wrappers for an enclaved C module. The wrapped enclave can then easily be linked to the legacy application that uses the module.
However, when the enclaved module and the surrounding application share a part of the heap and exchange pointers (a very common case in C programs), the generation of these wrappers requires programmer annotations and is error-prone – it is easy to introduce security vulnerabilities or program crashes.
This paper proposes a separation logic based language for specifying the interface of the enclaved C module, and shows how such an interface specification can be used to automatically generate secure wrappers that avoid these vulnerabilities and crashes.
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Acknowledgments
Raoul Strackx holds a Postdoctoral mandate from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). This research is partially funded by project grants from the Research Fund KU Leuven, and from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).
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van Ginkel, N., Strackx, R., Piessens, F. (2017). Automatically Generating Secure Wrappers for SGX Enclaves from Separation Logic Specifications. In: Chang, BY. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10695. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71237-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71237-6_6
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