Salsa: SGX Attestation for Live Streaming Applications

Intel SGX is a hardware-based security feature that allows executing software in enclaves that are strongly isolated from the operating system and applications. Even if an attacker gains full control over the system, it is not possible to inspect these enclaves. This makes SGX enclaves an adequate solution for storing and processing highly sensitive data, such as encryption keys. However, recent research demonstrates that enclaves are still highly vulnerable to standard software exploitation attacks. While SGX features static attestation, i.e., allowing validation of the integrity of the program code and data in the enclave, static attestation cannot cope with run-time attacks such as return-oriented programming. We present Salsa, the first solution to allow control-flow attestation of SGX enclaves. To show its applicability, we leverage Salsa to implement a video streaming service that uses an SGX enclave to decode the video stream. When a compromise of the SGX enclave is detected, the streaming of the video stops instantly. In the evaluation, we demonstrate that the performance of this setup is sufficiently efficient to attest a live video streaming service.