RISE Seminar 9/20/19: MI6: Secure Enclaves in a Speculative Out-of-Order Processor, a talk by Srini Devadas
September 20, 2019
Abstract: Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees. We propose MI6, an aggressive, speculative out-of-order processor capable of providing secure enclaves under a threat model that includes an untrusted OS and an attacker capable of mounting any software attack currently considered practical, including control flow speculation attacks. MI6 is inspired by Sanctum and extends its isolation guarantee to more realistic memory hierarchies. We model the performance impact of enclaves in MI6 through FPGA emulation on AWS F1 FPGAs by running SPEC CINT2006 benchmarks on top of an untrusted Linux OS. Security comes at the cost of approximately 16.4% average slowdown for protected programs. Joint work with Thomas Bourgeat, Ilia Lebedev, Andrew Wright, Sizhuo Zhang and Arvind (MICRO 2019).
Bio: Srini Devadas is the Webster Professor of EECS at MIT where he has been on the faculty since 1988. His current research interests are in computer security, computer architecture and applied cryptography. Devadas received the 2015 ACM/IEEE Richard Newton award, the 2017 IEEE W. Wallace McDowell award and the 2018 IEEE Charles A. Desoer award for his research in secure hardware. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. He is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, an Everett Moore Baker and a Bose award recipient, considered MIT’s highest teaching honors.