Malware Guard Extension:abusing Intel SGX to conceal cache attacks

In modern computer systems,user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware.Additionally,in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on the same physical machine.However,the hypervisor does not protect tenants against the cloud provider and thus,the supplied operating system and hardware.Intel SGX provides a mechanism that addresses this scenario.It aims at protecting user-level software from attacks from other processes,the operating system,and even physical attackers.In this paper,we demonstrate fine-grained software-based side-channel attacks from a malicious SGX enclave targeting co-located enclaves.Our attack is the first malware running on real SGX hardware,abusing SGX protection features to conceal itself.Furthermore,we demonstrate our attack both in a native environment and across multiple Docker containers.We perform a Prime+Probe cache side-channel attack on a co-located SGX enclave running an up-to-date RSA implementation that uses a constant-time multiplication primitive.The attack works,although in SGX enclaves,there are no timers,no large pages,no physical addresses,and no shared memory.In a semi-synchronous attack,we extract 96%of an RSA private key from a single trace.We extract the full RSA private key in an automated attack from 11 traces within 5 min.

Malware Guard Extension:abusing Intel SGX to conceal cache attacks

In modern computer systems,user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware.Additionally,in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on the same physical machine.However,the hypervisor does not protect tenants against the cloud provider and thus,the supplied operating system and hardware.Intel SGX provides a mechanism that addresses this scenario.It aims at protecting user-level software from attacks from other processes,the operating system,and even physical attackers.In this paper,we demonstrate fine-grained software-based side-channel attacks from a malicious SGX enclave targeting co-located enclaves.Our attack is the first malware running on real SGX hardware,abusing SGX protection features to conceal itself.Furthermore,we demonstrate our attack both in a native environment and across multiple Docker containers.We perform a Prime+Probe cache side-channel attack on a co-located SGX enclave running an up-to-date RSA implementation that uses a constant-time multiplication primitive.The attack works,although in SGX enclaves,there are no timers,no large pages,no physical addresses,and no shared memory.In a semi-synchronous attack,we extract 96% of an RSA private key from a single trace.We extract the full RSA private key in an automated attack from 11 traces within 5 min.