Interface-Based Side Channel Attack Against Intel SGX
This exposes a critical security flaw in Intel SGX, affecting users relying on its trusted computing for sensitive applications, and is incremental as it builds on known side channel vulnerabilities.
The paper tackles the vulnerability of Intel SGX to a new interface-based side channel attack, which infers enclave input data by observing interface invocation patterns, achieving up to 87.6% accuracy in tracking web pages on SGX-assisted platforms.
Intel has introduced a trusted computing technology, Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), which provides an isolated and secure execution environment called enclave for a user program without trusting any privilege software (e.g., an operating system or a hypervisor) or firmware. Nevertheless, SGX is vulnerable to several side channel attacks (e.g. page-fault-based attack and cache-based attack). In this paper, we explore a new, yet critical side channel attack in SGX, interface-based side channel attack, which can infer the information of the enclave input data. The root cause of the interface-based side channel attack is the input dependent interface invocation information (e.g., interface information and invocation patterns) which can be observed by the untrusted privilege software can reveal the control flow in the enclave. We study the methodology which can be used to conduct the interface-based side channel attack. To illustrate the effectiveness of the interface-based side-channel attacks, we use our methodology to infer whether tracked web pages have been processed by the SGX-assisted NFV platforms and achieve the accuracy of 87.6% and recall of 76.6%. We also identify the packets which belong to the tracked web pages, with the accuracy of 67.9%and recall of 71.1%. We finally propose some countermeasures to defense the interface-based side channel attack in SGX-assisted applications.