CFHider: Control Flow Obfuscation with Intel SGX

Abstract

When a program is executed on an untrusted cloud, the confidentiality of the program's logics needs to be protected. Control flow obfuscation is a direct approach to obtain this goal. However, existing methods in this direction cannot achieve both high confidentiality and low overhead. In this paper, we propose CFHider, a hardware-assisted method to protect the control flow confidentiality. By combining program transformation and Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) technology, CFHider moves branch statement conditions to an opaque and trusted memory space, i.e., the enclave, thereby offering a guaranteed control flow confidentiality. Based on the design of CFHider, we developed a prototype system targeting on Java applications. Our analysis and experimental results indicate that CFHider is effective in protecting the control flow confidentiality and incurs a much reduced performance overhead than existing software-based solutions (by a factor of 8.8).