Intel's Software Guard eXtension (SGX) aims to offer strong integrity and confidentiality properties, even in the presence of root-level attackers. However, while Intel clearly indicates that SGX offers no security against attackers with physical access, many current real world SGX deployments are actually done in potentially adversarial environments, where node operators have a financial incentive to subvert computations performed inside SGX enclaves. While the two threat models clearly differ, a common conception is that physical attacks on SGX require expensive laboratory equipment, thus putting them out of reach of hobbyist-level attackers.

Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) promises an isolated execution environment, protected from all software running on the machine. As such, numerous works have sought to leverage SGX to provide confidentiality and integrity guarantees for code running in adversarial environments. In the past few years however, SGX has come under heavy fire, threatened by numerous hardware attacks. With Intel repeatedly patching SGX to regain security while consistently launching new (micro)architectures, it is increasingly difficult to track the applicability of various attack techniques across the SGX design landscape.Thus, in this paper we set out to survey and categorize various SGX attacks, their applicability to different SGX architectures, as well as the information leaked by them. We then set out to explore the effectiveness of SGX’s update mechanisms in preventing attacks on real-world deployments. Here, we study two commercial SGX applications. First, we investigate the SECRET network, an SGX-backed blockchain aiming to provide privacy-preserving smart contracts. Next, we also consider PowerDVD, a UHD Blu-Ray Digital Rights Management (DRM) software licensed to play discs on PCs. We show that in both cases vendors are unable to meet security goals originally envisioned for their products, presumably due to SGX’s long update timelines and the complexities of a manual update process. This in turn forces vendors to make difficult security/usability trade offs, resulting in security compromises.

Cryptographic techniques have the potential to enable distrusting parties to collaborate in fundamentally new ways, but their practical implementation poses numerous challenges. An important class of such cryptographic techniques is known as Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). Developing Secure MPC applications in realistic scenarios requires extensive knowledge spanning multiple areas of cryptography and systems. And while the steps to arrive at a solution for a particular application are often straightforward, it remains difficult to make the implementation efficient, and tedious to apply those same steps to a slightly different application from scratch. Hence, it is an important problem to design platforms for implementing Secure MPC applications with minimum effort and using techniques accessible to non-experts in cryptography.