Practical Enclave Malware with Intel SGX

Schwarz, Michael; Weiser, Samuel; Gruss, Daniel

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-22038-9_9

Cited by 64 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…As EchoLoad does not require anything but memory loads, it works in restricted environments such as SGX and JavaScript. We highlight that EchoLoad can aid kernel exploitation from within SGX enclaves, facilitating SGX malware [81,82]. In contrast to previous ASLR breaks from JavaScript [7,29,76], we are the first to demonstrate a microarchitectural KASLR break from JavaScript on x86 OSs.…”

mentioning

confidence: 73%

KASLR: Break It, Fix It, Repeat

Canella

Schwarz

Haubenwallner

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

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In this paper, we analyze the hardware-based Meltdown mitigations in recent Intel microarchitectures, revealing that illegally accessed data is only zeroed out. Hence, while non-present loads stall the CPU, illegal loads are still executed. We present EchoLoad, a novel technique to distinguish load stalls from transiently executed loads. EchoLoad allows detecting physically-backed addresses from unprivileged applications, breaking KASLR in 40 µs on the newest Meltdown-and MDS-resistant Cascade Lake microarchitecture. As EchoLoad only relies on memory loads, it runs in highly-restricted environments, e.g., SGX or JavaScript, making it the first JavaScriptbased KASLR break. Based on EchoLoad, we demonstrate the first proof-of-concept Meltdown attack from JavaScript on systems that are still broadly not patched against Meltdown, i.e., 32-bit x86 OSs. We propose FLARE, a generic mitigation against known microarchitectural KASLR breaks with negligible overhead. By mapping unused kernel addresses to a reserved page and mirroring neighboring permission bits, we make used and unused kernel memory indistinguishable, i.e., a uniform behavior across the entire kernel address space, mitigating the root cause behind microarchitectural KASLR breaks. With incomplete hardware mitigations, we propose to deploy FLARE even on recent CPUs. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Operating systems security.

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confidence: 73%

KASLR: Break It, Fix It, Repeat

Canella

Schwarz

Haubenwallner

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Self Cite

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“…Yet, Scone incurs a high overhead and requires non-trivial software modifications. Finally, due to critical vulnerabilities found in SGX [31] cloud operators may want to disable SGX, incidentally disabling Scone.…”

Section: Discussion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging Kernel Security Mechanisms to Improve Container Security

Bélair

Laniepce

Menaud

2019

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

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Containerization is a lightweight virtualization technique reducing virtualization overhead and deployment latency compared to full VM; its popularity is quickly increasing. However, due to kernel sharing, containers provide less isolation than full VM. Thus, a compromised container may break out of its isolated context and gain root access to the host server. This is a huge concern, especially in multi-tenant cloud environments where we can find running on a single server containers serving very different purposes, such as banking microservices, compute nodes or honeypots. Thus, containers with specific security needs should be able to tune their own security level. Because OS-level defense approaches inherited from time-sharing OS generally requires administrator rights and aim to protect the entire system, they are not fully suitable to protect usermode containers. Research recently made several contributions to deliver enhanced security to containers from host OS level to (partially) solve these challenges. In this survey, we propose a new taxonomy on container defense at the infrastructure level with a particular focus on the virtualization boundary, where interactions between kernel and containers take place. We then classify the most promising defense frameworks into these categories. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Virtualization and security; Access control; • Computer systems organization → Cloud computing; • General and reference → Surveys and overviews.

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“…Another work [31] also profits from SGX isolation to stealthily operate by leveraging Intel's transactional synchronization extensions (TSX) memory-disclosure primitive. They show how to bypass the host application interface and execute arbitrary system calls via return-oriented programming (ROP), without collaboration from untrusted code.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Malware in the SGX supply chain: Be careful when signing enclaves!

Crăciun

Felber

Mogage

et al. 2020

IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Comput.

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Malware attacks are a significant part of the new software security threats detected each year. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are a set of hardware instructions introduced by Intel in their recent lines of processors that are intended to provide a secure execution environment for user-developed applications. To our knowledge, there was no serious attempt yet to overcome the SGX protection by exploiting the weaknesses in the software supply chain infrastructure, namely at the level of the development, build or signing servers. While SGX protection does not specifically take into consideration such threats, we show in the current paper that a simple malware attack exploiting a separation between the build and signing processes can have a serious damaging impact, practically nullifying SGX integrity protection measures. We also explore two possible mitigations against the attack, one centralized leveraging SGX itself, and one distributed that relies on a smart contract deployed on a blockchain infrastructure. Our evaluation shows that both methods are feasible in practice and their added costs are acceptable for the offered protection.

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Practical Enclave Malware with Intel SGX

Cited by 64 publications

References 31 publications

KASLR: Break It, Fix It, Repeat

KASLR: Break It, Fix It, Repeat

Leveraging Kernel Security Mechanisms to Improve Container Security

Malware in the SGX supply chain: Be careful when signing enclaves!

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