Using Intel® SGX technologies to secure large scale systems in public cloud environments

Abstract

Intel SGX enables securing applications at the hardware level, which makes it a very useful tool for running applications on untrusted hosts. Security based on hardware mechanisms is a rapidly evolving research area. SGX and similar tools have great potential to enhance security for many sensitive applications. Researchers are currently building tools that aid in porting of applications for use with the hardware based security. My work has demonstrated both benefits and limitations of the current SGX environment and associated tools. The current technology cannot support large applications such as MySQL server, and more work will need to be done to enable deployment of large-scale solutions.