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Malware Guard Extension: Using SGX to Conceal Cache Attacks

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Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10327))

Abstract

In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware. Additionally, in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on the same physical machine. However, the hypervisor does not protect tenants against the cloud provider and thus the supplied operating system and hardware. Intel SGX provides a mechanism that addresses this scenario. It aims at protecting user-level software from attacks from other processes, the operating system, and even physical attackers.

In this paper, we demonstrate fine-grained software-based side-channel attacks from a malicious SGX enclave targeting co-located enclaves. Our attack is the first malware running on real SGX hardware, abusing SGX protection features to conceal itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate our attack both in a native environment and across multiple Docker containers. We perform a Prime+Probe cache side-channel attack on a co-located SGX enclave running an up-to-date RSA implementation that uses a constant-time multiplication primitive. The attack works although in SGX enclaves there are no timers, no large pages, no physical addresses, and no shared memory. In a semi-synchronous attack, we extract 96% of an RSA private key from a single trace. We extract the full RSA private key in an automated attack from 11 traces.

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Acknowledgments

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 681402). This work was partially supported by the TU Graz LEAD project “Dependable Internet of Things in Adverse Environments”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Michael Schwarz, Samuel Weiser, Daniel Gruss, Clémentine Maurice & Stefan Mangard

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  1. Michael Schwarz
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  2. Samuel Weiser
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  3. Daniel Gruss
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  4. Clémentine Maurice
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  5. Stefan Mangard
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Correspondence to Michael Schwarz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA

    Michalis Polychronakis

  2. University of Bonn and Fraunhofer FKIE, Bonn, Germany

    Michael Meier

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Schwarz, M., Weiser, S., Gruss, D., Maurice, C., Mangard, S. (2017). Malware Guard Extension: Using SGX to Conceal Cache Attacks. In: Polychronakis, M., Meier, M. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10327. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60876-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60876-1_1

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