SgxPectre Attacks: Leaking Enclave Secrets via Speculative Execution

This paper presents SGXPECTRE Attacks that exploit the recently disclosed CPU bugs to subvert the confidentiality of SGX enclaves. Particularly, we show that when branch prediction of the enclave code can be influenced by programs outside the enclave, the control flow of the enclave program can be temporarily altered to execute instructions that lead to observable cache-state changes. An adversary observing such changes can learn secrets inside the enclave memory or its internal registers, thus completely defeating the confidentiality guarantee offered by SGX. To demonstrate the practicality of our SGXPECTRE Attacks, we have systematically explored the possible attack vectors of branch target injection, approaches to win the race condition during enclave’s speculative execution, and techniques to automatically search for code patterns required for launching the attacks. Our study suggests that any enclave program could be vulnerable to SGXPECTRE Attacks since the desired code patterns are available in most SGX runtimes (e.g., Intel SGX SDK, Rust-SGX, and Graphene-SGX).