A First Step Towards Leveraging Commodity Trusted Execution Environments for Network Applications

Network applications and protocols are increasingly adopting security and privacy features, as they are becoming one of the primary requirements. The wide-spread use of transport layer security (TLS) and the growing popularity of anonymity networks, such as Tor, exemplify this trend. Motivated by the recent movement towards commoditization of trusted execution environments (TEEs), this paper explores alternative design choices that application and protocol designers should consider. In particular, we explore the possibility of using Intel SGX to provide security and privacy in a wide range of network applications. We show that leveraging hardware protection of TEEs opens up new possibilities, often at the benefit of a much simplified application/protocol design. We demonstrate its practical implications by exploring the design space for SGX-enabled software-defined inter-domain routing, peer-to-peer anonymity networks (Tor), and middleboxes. Finally, we quantify the potential overheads of the SGX-enabled design by implementing it on top of OpenSGX, an open source SGX emulator.