Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation
Sanctum offers the same promise as Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), namely strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, but protects against an important class of additional software attacks that infer private information from a program’s memory a...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137536 |
| _version_ | 1826189994029481984 |
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| author | Costan, Victor Lebedev, Ilia Devadas, Srinivas |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Costan, Victor Lebedev, Ilia Devadas, Srinivas |
| author_sort | Costan, Victor |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Sanctum offers the same promise as Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), namely strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, but protects against an important class of additional software attacks that infer private information from a program’s memory access patterns. Sanctum shuns unnecessary complexity, leading to a simpler security analysis. We follow a principled approach to eliminating entire attack surfaces through isolation, rather than plugging attack-specific privacy leaks. Most of Sanctum’s logic is implemented in trusted software, which does not perform cryptographic operations using keys, and is easier to analyze than SGX’s opaque microcode, which does. Our prototype targets a Rocket RISC-V core, an open implementation that allows any researcher to reason about its security properties. Sanctum’s extensions can be adapted to other processor cores, because we do not change any major CPU building block. Instead, we add hardware at the interfaces between generic building blocks, without impacting cycle time. Sanctum demonstrates that strong software isolation is achievable with a surprisingly small set of minimally invasive hardware changes, and a very reasonable overhead. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:33:23Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/137536 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:33:23Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1375362022-09-23T12:52:11Z Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation Costan, Victor Lebedev, Ilia Devadas, Srinivas Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Sanctum offers the same promise as Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), namely strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, but protects against an important class of additional software attacks that infer private information from a program’s memory access patterns. Sanctum shuns unnecessary complexity, leading to a simpler security analysis. We follow a principled approach to eliminating entire attack surfaces through isolation, rather than plugging attack-specific privacy leaks. Most of Sanctum’s logic is implemented in trusted software, which does not perform cryptographic operations using keys, and is easier to analyze than SGX’s opaque microcode, which does. Our prototype targets a Rocket RISC-V core, an open implementation that allows any researcher to reason about its security properties. Sanctum’s extensions can be adapted to other processor cores, because we do not change any major CPU building block. Instead, we add hardware at the interfaces between generic building blocks, without impacting cycle time. Sanctum demonstrates that strong software isolation is achievable with a surprisingly small set of minimally invasive hardware changes, and a very reasonable overhead. 2021-11-05T16:22:34Z 2021-11-05T16:22:34Z 2016 2019-05-28T16:17:18Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137536 Costan, Victor, Lebedev, Ilia and Devadas, Srinivas. 2016. "Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation." en https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity16/technical-sessions/presentation/costan Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Other repository |
| spellingShingle | Costan, Victor Lebedev, Ilia Devadas, Srinivas Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation |
| title | Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation |
| title_full | Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation |
| title_fullStr | Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation |
| title_full_unstemmed | Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation |
| title_short | Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation |
| title_sort | sanctum minimal hardware extensions for strong software isolation |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137536 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT costanvictor sanctumminimalhardwareextensionsforstrongsoftwareisolation AT lebedevilia sanctumminimalhardwareextensionsforstrongsoftwareisolation AT devadassrinivas sanctumminimalhardwareextensionsforstrongsoftwareisolation |