Ryoan: A Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data

Ryoan provides a distributed sandbox, leveraging hardware enclaves (e.g., Intel’s software guard extensions (SGX)) to protect sandbox instances from potentially malicious computing platforms. The protected sandbox instances confine untrusted data-processing modules to prevent leakage of the user’s input data. Ryoan is designed for a request-oriented data model, where confined modules only process input once and do not persist state about the input. We present the design and prototype implementation of Ryoan and evaluate it on a series of challenging problems, including email filtering, health analysis, image processing, and machine translation.