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About this paper
Supraja Sridhara, Andrin Bertschi, Benedict Schlüter, Shweta Shinde
Researchers at ETH Zurich developed SIGY, an attack exploiting malicious asynchronous exceptions and signals to compromise Intel SGX enclaves. They found 7 out of 14 popular SGX frameworks and 8 out of 9 common programming languages were susceptible, demonstrating data leaks and integrity violations in real-world applications like Nginx and Node.js.
Key insights
- Intel SGX's design, while protecting against some hardware exceptions, lacks robust mechanisms to validate the authenticity of software-based exceptions and signals delivered asynchronously by the untrusted OS.
- The SIGY attack leverages the enclave's own benign, intended exception and signal handling functionality, turning these recovery mechanisms into vectors for compromise.
- A fundamental tension exists between enabling full application functionality (e.g., dynamic configuration updates, inter-process signaling) and achieving strong security guarantees in SGX due to this vulnerability.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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