SPARTA Publications

All accepted publications from SPARTA partners under its funding.

Provably Secure Isolation for Interruptible Enclaved Execution on Small Microprocessors

Matteo Busi, Job Noorman, Jo Van Bulck, Letterio Galletta, Pierpaolo Degano, Jan Tobias Mühlberg, Frank Piessens

Abstract

Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory,or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that break, or at least significantly weaken the isolation that these mechanisms offer. Extending a processor with new architectural or micro-architectural features, brings a risk of introducing new such side-channel attacks. This paper studies the problem of extending a processor with new features without weakening the security of the isolation mechanisms that the processor offers. We propose to use full abstraction as a formal criterion for the security of a processor extension, and we instantiate that criterion to the concrete case of extending a microprocessor that supports enclaved execution with secure interruptibility of these enclaves. This is a very relevant instantiation as several recent papers have shown that interruptibility of enclaves leads to a variety of software-basedside-channel attacks. We propose a design for interruptible enclaves, and prove that it satisfies our security criterion. We also implement the design on an open-source enclave-enabled microprocessor, and evaluate the cost of our design in terms of performance and hardware size.

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