Secure Enclaves for REactive Cloud Applications (SERECA)

Cloud security is of immediate concern to organisations that must comply with strict confidentiality and integrity policies. More broadly, security has emerged as a commercial imperative for cloud computing across a wide range of markets. The lack of adequate security guarantees is becoming the primary barrier to the broad adoption of cloud computing. The Secure Enclaves for REactive Cloud Applications (SERECA) project aims to remove technical impediments to secure cloud computing, and thereby encourage greater uptake of cost-effective and innovative cloud solutions in Europe. It proposes to develop secure enclaves, a new technique that exploits secure commodity CPU hardware for cloud deployments, empowering applications to ensure their own security without relying on public cloud operators. Secure enclaves additionally support regulatory-compliant data localisation by allowing applications to securely span multiple cloud data centres.

Although secure enclaves are a general mechanism, SERECA focuses on a particularly important and rapidly growing class of applications: reactive applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), augmented reality, gaming, computer-mediated social interaction, and the like. These applications are highly interactive, data intensive, and distributed, often involving extremely sensitive societal and personal information.

SERECA is validating its results through the development of two innovative and challenging industry-led use cases. One concerns the monitoring of a civil water supply network, a critical infrastructure targeted by malicious attacks. The other concerns a commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for analysing the performance of cloud-deployed applications. Such a service collects sensitive performance metrics about live usage, assets that must be protected from industrial espionage and other criminal activities.

SERECA aims to remove technical impediments to secure cloud computing, and thereby encourage greater uptake of cost-effective and innovative cloud solutions in Europe. It proposes to develop a secure environment for reactive cloud application using the new Intel's CPU extension: Software Guard eXtension (SGX). SERECA will allow the execution of sensitive code on Cloud platforms, without the need of trusting the public cloud operators. Furthermore, SERECA will support regulatory-compliant data localisation by allowing applications to securely span multiple cloud data centers.

Available source code

• Secure ZooKeeper using Intel SGX

Project partners

• Technische Universität Dresden
• Technische Universität Braunschweig
• Imperial College London
• Cloud&Heat Technologies
• Epsilon S.r.l.
• Red Hat
• jClarity
• E.I.P.L.I.

Project members at IBR

Publications

• Jo Van Bulck, Nico Weichbrodt, Rüdiger Kapitza, Frank Piessens and Raoul Strackx: Telling Your Secrets without Page Faults: Stealthy Page Table-Based Attacks on Enclaved Execution, in 26th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 17), USENIX Association, 2017 (bulck17usenixsecurity, BibTeX)
• Stefan Brenner, Tobias Hundt, Giovanni Mazzeo and Rüdiger Kapitza: Secure Cloud Micro Services using Intel SGX, in Proceedings of the 17th International IFIP Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, Neuchatel, Switzerland, Springer, 2017 (dais17vertxbridge, BibTeX)
• Joshua Lind, Christian Priebe, Divya Muthukumaran, Dan O'Keeffe, Pierre-Louis Aublin, Florian Kelbert, Tobias Reiher, David Goltzsche, David Eyers, Rüdiger Kapitza, Christof Fetzer and Peter Pietzuch: Glamdring: Automatic Application Partitioning for Intel SGX, in 2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 17), Santa Clara, CA, USENIX Association, 2017 (lind2017glamdring, BibTeX)
• Stefan Brenner, David Goltzsche and Rüdiger Kapitza: TrApps: Secure Compartments in the Evil Cloud, in XDOM0'17: Workshop on Security and Dependability of Multi-Domain Infrastructures, 2017 (xdom017trapps, BibTeX)
• Sergei Arnautov, Bohdan Trach, Franz Gregor, Thomas Knauth, André Martin, Christian Priebe, Joshua Lind, Divya Muthukumaran, Daniel O'Keeffe, Mark L Stillwell, David Goltzsche, Dave Eyers, Rüdiger Kapitza, Peter Pietzuch and Christof Fetzer: SCONE: Secure Linux Containers with Intel SGX, in 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), Savannah, GA, USA, USENIX, January 2016 (arnautov2016scone, BibTeX, Slides)
• Stefan Brenner, Colin Wulf, Matthias Lorenz, Nico Weichbrodt, David Goltzsche, Christof Fetzer, Peter Pietzuch and Rüdiger Kapitza: SecureKeeper: Confidential ZooKeeper using Intel SGX, in Middleware'16: 17th International Middleware Conference Proceedings, ACM, 2016 (mw16seckeeper, BibTeX)
• Nico Weichbrodt, Anil Kurmus, Peter Pietzuch and Rüdiger Kapitza: AsyncShock: Exploiting Synchronisation Bugs in Intel SGX Enclaves, in Proceedings of the 21st European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2016), 2016 (weichbr16esorics, BibTeX)

Student Theses

If you are interested in writing a thesis regarding this project, please feel free to contact us.

Links

• Official project website of SERECA