About to present our work - DEFLECTION - at DSN. Stay tuned!

A trusted execution environment (TEE) such as Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) runs attestation to prove to a data owner the integrity of the initial state of an enclave, including the program to operate on her data. For this purpose, the data-processing program is supposed to be open to the owner or a trusted third party, so its functionality can be evaluated before trust being established. In the real world, however, increasingly there are application scenarios in which the program itself needs to be protected (e.g., proprietary algorithm). So its compliance with privacy policies as expected by the data owner should be verified without exposing its code.

To this end, this paper presents Deflection, a new model for TEE-based delegated and flexible in-enclave code verification. Given that the conventional solutions do not work well under the resource-limited and TCB-frugal TEE, we come up with a new design inspired by Proof-Carrying Code. Our design strategically moves most of the workload to the code generator, which is responsible for producing easy-to-check code, while keeping the consumer simple. Also, the whole consumer can be made public and verified through a conventional attestation. We implemented this model on Intel SGX and demonstrate that it introduces a very small part of TCB. We also thoroughly evaluated its performance on micro- and macro- benchmarks and real-world applications, showing that the design only incurs a small overhead when enforcing several categories of security policies.