Ilya Alexandrovich

Innovative instructions and software model for isolated execution

For years the PC community has struggled to provide secure solutions on open platforms. Intel has developed innovative new technology to enable SW developers to develop and deploy secure applications on open platforms. The technology enables applications to execute with confidentiality and integrity in the native OS environment. It does this by providing ISA extensions for generating hardware enforceable containers at a granularity determined by the developer. These containers while opaque to the operating system are managed by the OS. This paper analyzes the threats and attacks to applications. It then describes the ISA extension for generating a HW based container. Finally it describes the programming model of this container.

Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) Support for Dynamic Memory Management Inside an Enclave

We introduce Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) SGX2 which extends the SGX instruction set to include dynamic memory management support for enclaves. Intel® SGX is a subset of the Intel Architecture Instruction Set [1]. SGX1 allows an application developer to build a trusted environment and execute inside that space. However SGX1 imposes limitations regarding memory commitment and reuse of enclave memory. The software developer is required to allocate all memory at enclave instantiation. This paper describes new instructions and programming models to extend support for dynamic memory management inside an enclave.

Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) Architecture for Oversubscription of Secure Memory in a Virtualized Environment

As workloads and data move to the cloud, it is essential that software writers are able to protect their applications from untrusted hardware, systems software, and co-tenants. Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enables a new mode of execution that is protected from attacks in such an environment with strong confidentiality, integrity, and replay protection guarantees. Though SGX supports memory oversubscription via paging, virtualizing the protected memory presents a significant challenge to Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) writers and comes with a high performance overhead. This paper introduces SGX Oversubscription Extensions that add additional instructions and virtualization support to the SGX architecture so that cloud service providers can oversubscribe secure memory in a less complex and more performant manner.