241 research outputs found
Security, Performance and Energy Trade-offs of Hardware-assisted Memory Protection Mechanisms
The deployment of large-scale distributed systems, e.g., publish-subscribe
platforms, that operate over sensitive data using the infrastructure of public
cloud providers, is nowadays heavily hindered by the surging lack of trust
toward the cloud operators. Although purely software-based solutions exist to
protect the confidentiality of data and the processing itself, such as
homomorphic encryption schemes, their performance is far from being practical
under real-world workloads.
The performance trade-offs of two novel hardware-assisted memory protection
mechanisms, namely AMD SEV and Intel SGX - currently available on the market to
tackle this problem, are described in this practical experience.
Specifically, we implement and evaluate a publish/subscribe use-case and
evaluate the impact of the memory protection mechanisms and the resulting
performance. This paper reports on the experience gained while building this
system, in particular when having to cope with the technical limitations
imposed by SEV and SGX.
Several trade-offs that provide valuable insights in terms of latency,
throughput, processing time and energy requirements are exhibited by means of
micro- and macro-benchmarks.Comment: European Commission Project: LEGaTO - Low Energy Toolset for
Heterogeneous Computing (EC-H2020-780681
SoK: A Systematic Review of TEE Usage for Developing Trusted Applications
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a feature of modern central
processing units (CPUs) that aim to provide a high assurance, isolated
environment in which to run workloads that demand both confidentiality and
integrity. Hardware and software components in the CPU isolate workloads,
commonly referred to as Trusted Applications (TAs), from the main operating
system (OS). This article aims to analyse the TEE ecosystem, determine its
usability, and suggest improvements where necessary to make adoption easier. To
better understand TEE usage, we gathered academic and practical examples from a
total of 223 references. We summarise the literature and provide a publication
timeline, along with insights into the evolution of TEE research and
deployment. We categorise TAs into major groups and analyse the tools available
to developers. Lastly, we evaluate trusted container projects, test
performance, and identify the requirements for migrating applications inside
them.Comment: In The 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and
Security (ARES 2023), August 29 -- September 01, 2023, Benevento, Italy. 15
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HardIDX: Practical and Secure Index with SGX
Software-based approaches for search over encrypted data are still either
challenged by lack of proper, low-leakage encryption or slow performance.
Existing hardware-based approaches do not scale well due to hardware
limitations and software designs that are not specifically tailored to the
hardware architecture, and are rarely well analyzed for their security (e.g.,
the impact of side channels). Additionally, existing hardware-based solutions
often have a large code footprint in the trusted environment susceptible to
software compromises. In this paper we present HardIDX: a hardware-based
approach, leveraging Intel's SGX, for search over encrypted data. It implements
only the security critical core, i.e., the search functionality, in the trusted
environment and resorts to untrusted software for the remainder. HardIDX is
deployable as a highly performant encrypted database index: it is logarithmic
in the size of the index and searches are performed within a few milliseconds
rather than seconds. We formally model and prove the security of our scheme
showing that its leakage is equivalent to the best known searchable encryption
schemes. Our implementation has a very small code and memory footprint yet
still scales to virtually unlimited search index sizes, i.e., size is limited
only by the general - non-secure - hardware resources
Faster enclave transitions for IO-intensive network applications
Process-based confidential computing enclaves such as Intel SGX have been proposed for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of network applications, without the overhead of virtualization. However, these solutions introduce other types of overhead, particularly the cost transitioning in and out of an enclave context. This makes the use of enclaves impractical for running IO-intensive applications, such as network packet processing. We build on ear- lier approaches to improve the IO performance of workloads in Intel SGX enclaves and propose the HotCall-Bundler library that helps reduce the cost of individual single enclave transitions and the total number of enclave transitions in trusted applications running in Intel SGX enclaves. We describe the implementation of the HotCall-Bundler library, evaluate its performance and demonstrate its practicality using the case study of Open vSwitch, a widely used software switch implementation
Prevention vs detection in online game cheating
Abstract. Cheating is a major problem in online games, but solving this would require either a complicated architecture design, costly third-party anti-cheat, or both. This paper aims to explore the differences between preventive and detective solutions against online game cheating. Specifically, it explores solutions against software-based cheatings, what kind of cheats there are, and what proposed and implemented solutions there are. This paper was conducted using literature reviews as methodology, using relevant papers from databases such as ResearchGate, ACM, and IEEE.
In this paper, it was concluded that a good prevention strategy during the game development phase is adequate to mitigate and prevent cheating but will require appropriate anti-cheat software to maintain fairness during the lifetime of the game. The importance of an online game’s network architecture choice in preventing cheating became apparent within this paper after comparing the benefits of each type side-by-side. Results showed that peer-to-peer architecture not having a trusted centralized authority means that the game needs to rely more on an anti-cheat software to prevent and detect cheating. This paper could not conclude what an appropriate anti-cheat software is because the topic is outside of the scope of this paper and lacks public data. Still, it does raise the question of whether a more aggressive anti-cheat strategy is suitable for a game or not
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