Glamdring: automatic application partitioning for Intel SGX

Abstract

Trusted execution support in modern CPUs, as offered by Intel SGX enclaves , can protect applications in untrusted environments. While prior work has shown that legacy applications can run in their entirety inside enclaves, this results in a large trusted computing base (TCB). Instead, we explore an approach in which we partition an applica- tion and use an enclave to protect only security-sensitive data and functions, thus obtaining a smaller TCB. We describe Glamdring , the first source-level parti- tioning framework that secures applications written in C using Intel SGX. A developer first annotates security- sensitive application data. Glamdring then automatically partitions the application into untrusted and enclave parts: (i) to preserve data confidentiality, Glamdring uses dataflow analysis to identify functions that may be ex- posed to sensitive data; (ii) for data integrity, it uses back- ward slicing to identify functions that may affect sensitive data. Glamdring then places security-sensitive functions inside the enclave, and adds runtime checks and crypto- graphic operations at the enclave boundary to protect it from attack. Our evaluation of Glamdring with the Mem- cached store, the LibreSSL library, and the Digital Bitbox bitcoin wallet shows that it achieves small TCB sizes and has acceptable performance overheads

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