Secure Live Migration of SGX Enclaves on Untrusted Cloud

Abstract

The recent commercial availability of Intel SGX (Software Guard eXtensions) provides a hardware-enabled building block for secure execution of software modules in an untrusted cloud. As an untrusted hypervisor/OS has no access to an enclave's running states, a VM (virtual machine) with enclaves running inside loses the capability of live migration, a key feature of VMs in the cloud. This paper presents the first study on the support for live migration of SGX-capable VMs. We identify the security properties that a secure enclave migration process should meet and propose a software-based solution. We leverage several techniques such as two-phase checkpointing and self-destroy to implement our design on a real SGX machine. Security analysis confirms the security of our proposed design and performance evaluation shows that it incurs negligible performance overhead. Besides, we give suggestions on the future hardware design for supporting transparent enclave migration.