Sanctum: Minimal Hardware Extensions for Strong Software Isolation
Host
Alin Tomescu
MIT
ABSTRACT
With the increasing prevalence of remote computation via cloud services and ubiquitous IoT devices, we must accept the security vulnerabilities inevitably found in these complex systems. Software systems built in practice are far too large for contemporary formal verification, as they must include all privileged software systems in the trusted computing base of any unprivileged workload. The staggering complexity of modern hardware further complicates matters, undermining simple guarantees such as process isolation.
TXT, SGX, TrustZone and similar work attempt to employ trusted hardware to construct an isolated software container and exclude some software from the TCB. While well-intentioned, these defy security analysis and present complex or vague threat models, all undermining their potential role as foundations for secure systems.
With our work (the Sanctum processor), we advocate for a transparent system with isolated containers. We offer integrity and confidentiality guarantees against a broad and straightforward threat model (a remote adversary capable of subverting arbitrary software on the system). While this work is certainly not the end-all to computer systems security, we propose a compelling threat model to inform future systems, and bootstrap one trusted platform on which secure systems may be built.
BIO
Ilia Lebedev is a PhD candidate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. He works in the area of computer systems security, currently focused on bootstrapping trust for remotely attested computation. He deeply values accessible education and has received the 2016 Hazen Award for outstanding teaching. Outside of his academic career, he is a sailing ship captain, a bartender, and a generally questionable individual.
With the increasing prevalence of remote computation via cloud services and ubiquitous IoT devices, we must accept the security vulnerabilities inevitably found in these complex systems. Software systems built in practice are far too large for contemporary formal verification, as they must include all privileged software systems in the trusted computing base of any unprivileged workload. The staggering complexity of modern hardware further complicates matters, undermining simple guarantees such as process isolation.
TXT, SGX, TrustZone and similar work attempt to employ trusted hardware to construct an isolated software container and exclude some software from the TCB. While well-intentioned, these defy security analysis and present complex or vague threat models, all undermining their potential role as foundations for secure systems.
With our work (the Sanctum processor), we advocate for a transparent system with isolated containers. We offer integrity and confidentiality guarantees against a broad and straightforward threat model (a remote adversary capable of subverting arbitrary software on the system). While this work is certainly not the end-all to computer systems security, we propose a compelling threat model to inform future systems, and bootstrap one trusted platform on which secure systems may be built.
BIO
Ilia Lebedev is a PhD candidate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. He works in the area of computer systems security, currently focused on bootstrapping trust for remotely attested computation. He deeply values accessible education and has received the 2016 Hazen Award for outstanding teaching. Outside of his academic career, he is a sailing ship captain, a bartender, and a generally questionable individual.