Biblio

Recent proposals for trusted hardware platforms, such as Intel SGX and the MIT Sanctum processor, offer compelling security features but lack formal guarantees. We introduce a verification methodology based on a trusted abstract platform (TAP), a formalization of idealized enclave platforms along with a parameterized adversary. We also formalize the notion of secure remote execution and present machine-checked proofs showing that the TAP satisfies the three key security properties that entail secure remote execution: integrity, confidentiality and secure measurement. We then present machine-checked proofs showing that SGX and Sanctum are refinements of the TAP under certain parameterizations of the adversary, demonstrating that these systems implement secure enclaves for the stated adversary models.

Critical resource sharing among multiple entities in a processing system is inevitable, which in turn calls for the presence of appropriate authentication and access control mechanisms. Generally speaking, these mechanisms are implemented via trusted software "policy checkers" that enforce certain high level application-specific "rules" to enforce a policy. Whether implemented as operating system modules or embedded inside the application ad hoc, these policy checkers expose additional attack surface in addition to the application logic. In order to protect application software from an adversary, modern secure processing platforms, such as Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), employ principled hardware isolation to offer secure software containers or enclaves to execute trusted sensitive code with some integrity and privacy guarantees against a privileged software adversary. We extend this model further and propose using these hardware isolation mechanisms to shield the authentication and access control logic essential to policy checker software. While relying on the fundamental features of modern secure processors, our framework introduces productive software design guidelines which enable a guarded environment to execute sensitive policy checking code - hence enforcing application control flow integrity - and afford flexibility to the application designer to construct appropriate high-level policies to customize policy checker software.