Hacker News Reader

Comment by achamayou | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure why you think that SGX shows hardware enclaves “don’t work”. I also don’t see why you think enclaves “protect the malware from you”. Enclaves are created and started from host code, which can interrupt or terminate them at any time.

The scheme you suggest, which isn’t typically how TrustZone is used, gives zero integrity and confidentiality guarantees for applications. I don’t know if it’s “the right way” for some threat model, but for the most typical TEE use cases which are trying to establish strong integrity and confidentiality guarantees in the presence of an untrusted host, it’s absolutely not right nor useful.

View on HN

Critical flaws in SGX are being found all the time. It's a failed experiment that someone put into commercial products. At the same time there are no examples of SGX-like architecture that actually do work.

Enclaves are started from host code, but host code can't see into them. In other words you have no way of telling whether the enclave you've started is what you wanted, or if it includes malware.

The scheme I've described does give integrity - after all, that's precisely how the actual trusted components work, SecureEnclave, TEE etc: you have a trusted hypervisor, and then run your secure components outside the untrusted OS, in a trusted environment in that trusted hypervisor. It gives you everything SGX could, without its fundamental design problems.

What you’re saying is a different threat model: your application goes rogue. SGX and TEE in general attempt to solve the reverse: your host goes rogue.

Research has shown that it is not a panacea, but we already knew that. It’s hardware not a full proof cryptographic solution. Some solutions have enclaves gather their results in a fault tolerant way to increase security even more.

So we could say that Intel and hardware vendors in general are looking for a solution that doesn’t exist. Or we can say that this is greatly improving your option when you are really scared of host compromises in your product.

I don’t think it’s helpful to confuse side-channel or micro-architectural attacks with attacks on SGX itself. Stating that hardware enclaves don’t work and do not ship is absurd, they are present in virtually every modern phone for one thing.

Code running in an SGX enclave is measured and absolutely known at enclave launch. The fact that enclave memory is encrypted for confidentiality is unrelated.

I don’t understand why you think trusting the hyper visor is helping anything. You are still open to this attack, and to all side channel attacks as soon as you run any untrusted code.

Which phone uses enclave on top of untrusted OS, as opposed to running the enclave on the side of untrusted OS?

Every Android phone which has an ARM chip with Trustzone.

Which doesn't run on top of on untrusted OS, like with SGX, but rather on the side, which is what I'm describing.

Both SGX and Trustzone are TEEs, which are segregated from the rich execution environment (the untrusted OS)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com