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What's Intel SGX Good For?

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Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#31

Post by vladivstok »

rkagerer wrote: post #25
pram wrote: post #8

From a paper in that article: "Intel has recently added support for monotonic counters [5] as an optional SGX feature that an enclave developer may use for rollback attack pro- tection, when available. However, the security and per- formance properties of this mechanism are not precisely documented. We performed a detailed analysis of SGX counters and report our findings in Appendix B. To summarize, we found out that…

How long until we see an SGX-damaging malware in the wild that simply eats up all the monotonic counters?

SGX is disabled by default on most systems so it would have to be a very targeted malware

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#32

Post by rkagerer »

vladivstok wrote: post #31
rkagerer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long until we see an SGX-damaging malware in the wild that simply eats up all the monotonic counters?

SGX is disabled by default on most systems so it would have to be a very targeted malware

Truly disabled, or in the Software Controlled state?

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#33

Post by als0 »

eqvinox wrote: post #19
vladivstok wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption behind PoET is precisely that you don't control a part of your machine (the SGX enclave). I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR.

> I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR. Out of curiosity, I would've hoped that the consensus in the cryptography community is that "secure enclaves" are pretty much snake oil to begin with... is this not the case? (I mean... for a secure enclave to actually work, you need "perfect" physical security, "perfect" software implementation inside, and "perfect" design of the cryptog…

There is no such thing as perfect security - it is always a risk assessment exercise. Secure enclaves in general are not snake oil. Secure elements and TPMs, for example, are evaluated by independent testing bodies to high levels of security certification. These are examples of secure enclaves. Secure enclaves in this context, SGX, are an on-CPU mechanism that have weaker isolation properties than other enclaves. However, SGX has a different set of advantages, and may be acceptable to use based on the value of the asset being protected.

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#34

Post by aseipp »

rkagerer wrote: post #32
vladivstok wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SGX is disabled by default on most systems so it would have to be a very targeted malware

Truly disabled, or in the Software Controlled state?

Your motherboard UEFI blob and chip both have to support it. The vast majority of systems are limited by the fact their UEFI implementation does not enable (or allow you to enable) SGX at all, and at least on my Ice Lake laptop, SGX was disabled out of the box in UEFI (in a non-software controlled state.)

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#35

Post by RyJones »

The Linux Foundation is a foundation.

Hyperledger Project is a project of the Linux Foundation, not a foundation in and of itself.

Source: Am Linux Foundation employee working on Hyperledger

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#36

Post by aseipp »

eqvinox wrote: post #19
vladivstok wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption behind PoET is precisely that you don't control a part of your machine (the SGX enclave). I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR.

> I agree that that's an unreasonable assumption which is why we developed RRR. Out of curiosity, I would've hoped that the consensus in the cryptography community is that "secure enclaves" are pretty much snake oil to begin with... is this not the case? (I mean... for a secure enclave to actually work, you need "perfect" physical security, "perfect" software implementation inside, and "perfect" design of the cryptog…

You have a very limited understanding of what "works" and what is "impossible", it seems. Actual security engineering occurs in hostile environments all the time, in extremely non-perfect environments, with non-perfect tools, and many of its principles (and practices) noticeably make security better for users, operators, and engineers. Similarly, DRM is not only NOT "impossible", it's very possible, very real, and actively used against people today. I suspect if you truly think DRM is "impossible" you have a vastly more limited understanding of security than you think you do.

Computer people have absolutely got to get out of this mindset where impossible means "according to my made up set of Nerd rules", vs the rules that are in place in the world surrounding them.

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#37

Post by yarrel »

SGX is trusted third party hardware.

The best thing that you can say about this is that it is good for some corporate mockchain use cases as long as the existing attacks against it aren't used and worse ones aren't developed.

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#38

Post by [deleted] »

jnwatson wrote: post #28
eqvinox wrote: post #2

So the security of a blockchain now depends on the security of the SGX enclave? What could possibly go wrong... > Unfortunately, this proposal suffers from a critical security economics issue: node maintainers here have a strong incentive to break into their own SGX chips. If an adversary managed to compromise their SGX, they could win the leader election at every round by setting the timeout to 0. The more valuable…

Part of it is community agreement. In order to mutually trust what we do on each others' machines, we give up some rights, including the ability to lie about what you executed on your own machine. It is the implicit agreement in Folding @home and many community computation projects, only this is better enforced. Peer-to-peer computation is hard to implement because of the quite hairy social aspect of requiring a trus…

[deleted]

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#39

Post by centimeter »

jnwatson wrote: post #28
eqvinox wrote: post #2

So the security of a blockchain now depends on the security of the SGX enclave? What could possibly go wrong... > Unfortunately, this proposal suffers from a critical security economics issue: node maintainers here have a strong incentive to break into their own SGX chips. If an adversary managed to compromise their SGX, they could win the leader election at every round by setting the timeout to 0. The more valuable…

Part of it is community agreement. In order to mutually trust what we do on each others' machines, we give up some rights, including the ability to lie about what you executed on your own machine. It is the implicit agreement in Folding @home and many community computation projects, only this is better enforced. Peer-to-peer computation is hard to implement because of the quite hairy social aspect of requiring a trus…

> In order to mutually trust what we do on each others' machines, we give up some rights

I trust what people do on their machines to the extent they can cryptographically prove it to me. Anything else is, for me, an unacceptable compromise.

Re: What's Intel SGX Good For?

#40

Post by tarun_anand »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #18

On a related note, here's a project[1] that runs JS workers in Intel SGX enclaves using the Duktape JS interpreter. [1]: https://github.com/evervault/node-secureworker

We looked at it and found it to be very unstable and buggy.

Eventually we gave it up in place of native SGX programming.

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