The Guard's Dilemma: Efficient Code-Reuse Attacks Against Intel SGX

Authors: 

Andrea Biondo and Mauro Conti, University of Padua; Lucas Davi, University of Duisburg-Essen; Tommaso Frassetto and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Abstract: 

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) isolate security-critical code inside a protected memory area called enclave. Previous research on SGX has demonstrated that memory corruption vulnerabilities within enclave code can be exploited to extract secret keys and bypass remote attestation. However, these attacks require kernel privileges, and rely on frequently probing enclave code which results in many enclave crashes. Further, they assume a constant, not randomized memory layout. In this paper, we present novel exploitation techniques against SGX that do not require any enclave crashes and work in the presence of existing SGX randomization approaches such as SGX-Shield. A key contribution of our attacks is that they work under weak adversarial assumptions, e.g., not requiring kernel privileges. In fact, they can be applied to any enclave that is developed with the standard Intel SGX SDK on either Linux or Windows.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {217636,
author = {Andrea Biondo and Mauro Conti and Lucas Davi and Tommaso Frassetto and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi},
title = {The Guard{\textquoteright}s Dilemma: Efficient {Code-Reuse} Attacks Against Intel {SGX}},
booktitle = {27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18)},
year = {2018},
isbn = {978-1-939133-04-5},
address = {Baltimore, MD},
pages = {1213--1227},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/biondo},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

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