IMPROVING EFFICIENCY OF SECURE SERVICES WITH HARDWARE-ASSISTED ATTESTED EXECUTION
COM2 Level 4
Executive Classroom, COM2-04-02
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a rapidly growing reliance of various applications on cloud services, mostly due to their manifold benefits including most-effectiveness and elasticity. Despite the many advantages, the online services have raised multiple security and privacy concerns. The chief reason behind these concerns stems from the trustworthiness issue of the service providers. While cryptographic techniques to address the aforementioned security and privacy concerns exist, their performance overhead is often too high for practical applications.
We leverage trusted computing, especially commodity hardware primitives such as Intel SGX-enabled processors, to enhance the efficiency of secure online services. Firstly, we propose a secure timed challenge-response protocol that leverages trusted hardware to establish assurance on data residency. Secondly, we codify an approach called Scramble-then-Compute for enabling privacy-preserving computations with trusted computing at scale, and demonstrate its efficiency on various major data management algorithms (e.g., sort, compaction, selection, aggregation, and join). Thirdly, we present a framework to enable a fair marketplace for secure outsourced computations. Our framework takes advantage of attested enclave execution to protect the confidentiality of clients??? inputs, to ensure the integrity of the outsourced computations, and to mediate exchanges between the clients and compute nodes participating in the marketplace. Finally, we take a principled approach to apply sharding to blockchain systems in order to improve their transaction throughput at scale. Our approach relies on trusted hardware to achieve high performance for both consensus and shard formation protocol.