TRUSTORE: Side-Channel Resistant Storage for SGX using Intel Hybrid CPU-FPGA

Abstract

Intel SGX is a security solution promising strong and practical security guarantees for trusted computing. However, recent reports demonstrated that such security guarantees of SGX are broken due to access pattern based side-channel attacks, including page fault, cache, branch prediction, and speculative execution. In order to stop these side-channel attackers, Oblivious RAM (ORAM) has gained strong attention from the security community as it provides cryptographically proven protection against access pattern based side-channels. While several proposed systems have successfully applied ORAM to thwart side-channels, those are severely limited in performance and its scalability due to notorious performance issues of ORAM. This paper presents TrustOre, addressing these issues that arise when using ORAM with Intel SGX. TrustOre leverages an external device, FPGA, to implement a trusted storage service within a completed isolated environment secure from side-channel attacks. TrustOre tackles several challenges in achieving such a goal: extending trust from SGX to FPGA without imposing architectural changes, providing a verifiably-secure connection between SGX applications and FPGA, and seamlessly supporting various access operations from SGX applications to FPGA.We implemented TrustOre on the commodity Intel Hybrid CPU-FPGA architecture. Then we evaluated with three state-of-the-art ORAM-based SGX applications, ZeroTrace, Obliviate, and Obfuscuro, as well as an end-to-end key-value store application. According to our evaluation, TrustOre-based applications outperforms ORAM-based original applications ranging from 10x to 43x, while also showing far better scalability than ORAM-based ones. We emphasize that since TrustOre can be deployed as a simple plug-in to SGX machine's PCIe slot, it is readily used to thwart side-channel attacks in SGX, arguably one of the most cryptic and critical security holes today.