A Survey of Published Attacks on Intel SGX
This is an incremental survey for researchers and practitioners working with SGX security.
The paper surveys all known attacks targeting Intel SGX, categorizing them into 7 types and reviewing available defense mechanisms.
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provides a trusted execution environment (TEE) to run code and operate sensitive data. SGX provides runtime hardware protection where both code and data are protected even if other code components are malicious. However, recently many attacks targeting SGX have been identified and introduced that can thwart the hardware defence provided by SGX. In this paper we present a survey of all attacks specifically targeting Intel SGX that are known to the authors, to date. We categorized the attacks based on their implementation details into 7 different categories. We also look into the available defence mechanisms against identified attacks and categorize the available types of mitigations for each presented attack.