Secure Content-Based Routing Using Intel Software Guard Extensions

Abstract

Content-based routing (CBR) is a powerful model that supports scalable asynchronous communication among large sets of geographically distributed nodes. Yet, preserving privacy represents a major limitation for the wide adoption of CBR, notably when the routers are located in public clouds. Indeed, a CBR router must see the content of the messages sent by data producers, as well as the filters (or subscriptions) registered by data consumers. This represents a major deterrent for companies for which data is a key asset, as for instance in the case of financial markets or to conduct sensitive business-to-business transactions. While there exists some techniques for privacy-preserving computation, they are either prohibitively slow or too limited to be usable in real systems. In this paper, we follow a different strategy by taking advantage of trusted hardware extensions that have just been introduced in off-the-shelf processors and provide a trusted execution environment. We exploit Intel's new software guard extensions (SGX) to implement a CBR engine in a secure enclave. Thanks to the hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE), the compute-intensive CBR operations can operate on decrypted data shielded by the enclave and leverage efficient matching algorithms. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that SGX adds only limited overhead to insecure plaintext matching outside secure enclaves while providing much better performance and more powerful filtering capabilities than alternative software-only solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate the practical benefits of SGX for privacy-preserving CBR.Comment: Middleware '16 Trento, Italy - 10 page

SGX-Aware Container Orchestration for Heterogeneous Clusters

“…The main sources of overhead for SGX enclaved executions are the transitions between protected and unprotected modes, and memory usage [18], [46]- [48]. Additionally, startup time is longer than traditional executions, mainly due to support service initialization and memory allocation.…”

Achieving Data Dissemination with Security using FIWARE and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX)

“…Intel SGX is used to implement a Secure Content-Based Routing (SCBR) system [6], providing privacy preserving to messages, since they are not exposed to unauthorized parties and they are filtered only in a secure enclave. Extensive experiments concluded that SGX adds a limited overhead providing much better performance when compared to other alternatives of Secure CBR.…”

“…To avoid such kind of attacks, the data can be encrypted in the producers in order to be processed only in a secure way. This can be achieved by homomorphic cryptography [5], which performs common operations over encrypted data, but its great overhead makes it unpractical to use with complex operations [6]. Another approach is the use of a trusted execution environment (TEE), that enables, by using specific hardware instructions, the creation of a shielded space in the memory in a way data can be processed securely inside this space.…”

PubSub-SGX: Exploiting Trusted Execution Environments for Privacy-Preserving Publish/Subscribe Systems

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is only one existing system (SCBR [26]) that efficiently combines the publish/subscribe paradigm with Intel SGX. SCBR integrates with Intel SGX by running the code of the brokers inside the enclaves, thus preventing an attacker with full control to inspect the messages in transit through the network.…”