AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) is an emerging technology of AMD server processors, which provides transparent memory encryption and key management for virtual machines (VM) without trusting the underlying hypervisor. Like Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), SEV forms a foundation for confidential computing on untrusted machines; unlike SGX, SEV supports full VM encryption and thus makes porting applications straightforward. To date, many mainstream cloud service providers, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, have already adopted (or are planning to adopt) SEV for confidential cloud services.

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential processor optimization, and a source of such variances, can cause severe detriment on deliberate branch mispredictions. Despite static analysis could qualitatively verify the timing-leakage-free property under speculative execution, it is incapable of producing endorsements including inputs and speculated flows to diagnose leaks in depth. This work proposes a new symbolic execution based method, SpecuSym, for precisely detecting cache timing leaks introduced by speculative execution. Given a program (leakage-free in non-speculative execution), SpecuSym systematically explores the program state space, models speculative behavior at conditional branches, and accumulates the cache side effects along with subsequent path explorations. During the dynamic execution, SpecuSym constructs leak predicates for memory visits according to the specified cache model and conducts a constraint-solving based cache behavior analysis to inspect the new cache behaviors. We have implemented SpecuSym atop KLEE and evaluated it against 15 open-source benchmarks. Experimental results show that SpecuSym successfully detected from 2 to 61 leaks in 6 programs under 3 different cache settings and identified false positives in 2 programs reported by recent work.

As one of the fundamental optimizations in modern processors, the out-of-order execution boosts the pipeline throughput by executing independent instructions in parallel rather than in their program orders. However, due to the side effects introduced by such microarchitectural optimization to the CPU cache, secret-critical applications may suffer from timing side-channel leaks. This paper presents a symbolic execution-based technique, named SymO 3 , for exposing cache timing leaks under the context of out-of-order execution. SymO 3 proposes new components that address the modeling, reduction, and reasoning challenges of accommodating program analysis to the software code out-of-order analysis. We implemented SymO 3 upon KLEE and conducted three evaluations on it. Experimental results show that SymO 3 successfully uncovers a set of cache timing leaks in five real-world programs. Also, SymO 3 finds that, in general, program transformation from compiler optimizations shrink the surface to timing leaks. Furthermore, augmented with a speculative execution modeling, SymO 3 identifies five more leaky programs based on the compound analysis.

Recent advances in trusted execution environments, specifically with Intel's introduction of SGX on consumer processors, have provided unprecedented opportunities to create secure applications with a small TCB. While a large number of SGX solutions have been proposed, nearly all of them focus on protecting native code applications, leaving scripting languages unprotected. To fill this gap, this paper presents SCRIPTSHIELD, a framework capable of running legacy script code while simultaneously providing confidentiality and integrity for scripting code and data. In contrast to the existing schemes that either require tedious and time-consuming re-development or result in a large TCB by importing an entire library OS or container, SCRIPTSHIELD keeps the TCB small and provides backwards compatibility (i.e., no changes needed to the scripting code itself). The core idea is to customize the script interpreter to run inside an SGX enclave and pass scripts to it. We have implemented SCRIPTSHIELD and tested with three popular scripting languages: Lua, JavaScript, and Squirrel. Our experimental results show that SCRIPTSHIELD does not cause noticeable overhead. The source code of SCRIPTSHIELD has been made publicly available as an open source project.

Intel Software Guard eXtension (SGX), a hardware supported trusted execution environment (TEE), is designed to protect security critical applications. However, it does not terminate traditional memory corruption vulnerabilities for the software running inside enclave, since enclave software is still developed with type unsafe languages such as C/C++. This paper presents RUST-SGX, an efficient and layered approach to exterminating memory corruption for software running inside SGX enclaves. The key idea is to enable the development of enclave programs with an efficient memory safe system language Rust with a RUST-SGX SDK by solving the key challenges of how to (1) make the SGX software memory safe and (2) meanwhile run as efficiently as with the SDK provided by Intel. We therefore propose to build RUST-SGX atop Intel SGX SDK, and tame unsafe components with formally proven memory safety. We have implemented RUST-SGX and tested with a series of benchmark programs. Our evaluation results show that RUST-SGX imposes little extra overhead (less than 5% with respect to the SGX specific features and services compared to software developed by Intel SGX SDK), and meanwhile have stronger memory safety.

Intel SGX provides a secure enclave in which code and data are hidden from the outside world, including privileged code such as the OS or hypervisor. However, by default, enclave code prior to initialization can be disassembled and therefore no secrets can be embedded in the binary. This is a problem for developers wishing to protect code secrets. This paper introduces SGXElide, a nearly-transparent framework that enables enclave code confidentiality. The key idea is to treat program code as data and dynamically restore secrets after an enclave is initialized. SGXElide can be integrated into any enclave, providing a mechanism to securely decrypt or deliver the secret code with the assistance of a developer-controlled trusted remote party. We have implemented SGXElide atop a recently released version of the Linux SGX SDK, and our evaluation with a number of programs shows that SGXElide can be used to protect the code secrecy of practical applications with no overhead after enclave initialization.

Intel SGX is the next-generation trusted computing infrastructure. It can e effctively protect data inside enclaves from being stolen. Similar to traditional programs, SGX enclaves are likely to have security vulnerabilities and can be exploited as well. This gives an adversary a great opportunity to steal secret data or perform other malicious operations. Rust is one of the system programming languages with promising security properties. It has powerful checkers and guarantees memory-safety and thread-safety. In this paper, we show Rust SGX SDK, which combines Intel SGX and Rust programming language together. By using Rust SGX SDK, developers could write memory-safe secure enclaves easily, eliminating the most possibility of being pwned through memory vulnerabilities. What's more, the Rust enclaves are able to run as fast as the ones written in C/C++.

With the exponential growth of the usage of web map services, geo-data analysis has become more and more popular. This article develops an online spatial data analysis and visualization system, TerraFly GeoCloud, which helps end-users visualize and analyze spatial data and share the analysis results. Built on the TerraFly Geo spatial database, TerraFly GeoCloud is an extra layer running upon the TerraFly map and can efficiently support many different visualization functions and spatial data analysis models. Furthermore, users can create unique URLs to visualize and share the analysis results. TerraFly GeoCloud also enables the MapQL technology to customize map visualization using SQL-like statements. The system is available at http://terrafly.fiu.edu/GeoCloud/.

GIS systems and online services are growing at a very fast pace, however, there are few online services for the analysis of geospatial epidemiology and their functionality is limited. We present a geospatial epidemiology analysis system on the TerraFly Geo-spatial Cloud platform. The system provides comprehensive spatial analysis methods and visualization. In this system, the user is not required to program in order to employ the functionality. All the datasets are stored in the Geo-spatial Cloud. This system is accessible at http://terrafly.fiu.edu/GeoCloud/. The system API algorithms adapted to geospatial epidemiology. The application utilizes the GeoCloud distributed storage system for the Big Data to be analyzed, it utilizes an interactive mapping API to display results.