The SEVerESt Of Them All: Inference Attacks Against Secure Virtual Enclaves Jan Werner Joshua Mason Manos Antonakakis UNC Chapel Hill U. Illinois Georgia Tech
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Michalis Polychronakis Fabian Monrose Stony Brook University UNC Chapel Hill
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT and Communications Security (AsiaCCS ’19), July 9–12, 2019, Auckland, The success of cloud computing has shown that the cost and con- New Zealand. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ venience benefits of outsourcing infrastructure, platform, and soft- 3321705.3329820 ware resources outweigh concerns about confidentiality. Still, many businesses resist moving private data to cloud providers due to in- 1 INTRODUCTION tellectual property and privacy reasons. A recent wave of hardware Of late, the need for a Trusted Execution Environment has risen virtualization technologies aims to alleviate these concerns by of- to the forefront as an important consideration for many parties in fering encrypted virtualization features that support data confiden- the cloud computing ecosystem. Cloud computing refers to the use tiality of guest virtual machines (e.g., by transparently encrypting of on-demand networked infrastructure software and capacity to memory) even when running on top untrusted hypervisors. provide resources to customers [52]. In today’s marketplace, con- We introduce two new attacks that can breach the confidentiality tent providers desire the ability to deliver copyrighted or sensitive of protected enclaves. First, we show how a cloud adversary can material to clients without the risk of data leaks. At the same time, judiciously inspect the general purpose registers to unmask the computer manufacturers must be able to verify that only trusted computation that passes through them.