Speeding up enclave transitions for IO-intensive applications
This addresses a bottleneck for users of confidential computing in IO-heavy domains like networking or bioinformatics, but it is incremental as it builds on earlier approaches.
The paper tackles the performance overhead of enclave transitions in Intel SGX for IO-intensive applications by proposing the SGX-Bundler library, which reduces both individual and total transition costs, demonstrated with Open vSwitch.
Process-based confidential computing enclaves such as Intel SGX can be used to protect the confidentiality and integrity of workloads, without the overhead of virtualisation. However, they introduce a notable performance overhead, especially when it comes to transitions in and out of the enclave context. Such overhead makes the use of enclaves impractical for running IO-intensive applications, such as network packet processing or biological sequence analysis. We build on earlier approaches to improve the IO performance of work-loads in Intel SGX enclaves and propose the SGX-Bundler library, which helps reduce the cost of both individual single enclave transitions well as of the total number of enclave transitions in trusted applications running in Intel SGX enclaves. We describe the implementation of the SGX-Bundler library, evaluate its performance and demonstrate its practicality using the case study of Open vSwitch, a widely used software switch implementation.