SGX-Bomb

Abstract

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) provides a strongly isolated memory space, known as an enclave, for a user process, ensuring confidentiality and integrity against software and hardware attacks. Even the operating system and hypervisor cannot access the enclave because of the hardware-level isolation. Further, hardware attacks are neither able to disclose plaintext data from the enclave because its memory is always encrypted nor modify it because its integrity is always verified using an integrity tree. When the processor detects any integrity violation, it locks itself to prevent further damages; that is, a system reboot is necessary. The processor lock seems a reasonable solution against such a powerful hardware attacker; however, if a software attacker has a way to trigger integrity violation, the lock could result in a severe denial-of-service (DoS) attack.