Secure Tera-scale Data Crunching with a Small TCB

Abstract

Outsourcing services to third-party providers comes with a high security cost—to fully trust the providers. Using trusted hardware can help, but current trusted execution environments do not adequately support services that process very large scale datasets. We present LAST-GT, a system that bridges this gap by supporting the execution of self-contained services over a large state, with a small and generic trusted computing base (TCB). LAST-GT uses widely deployed trusted hardware to guarantee integrity and verifiability of the execution on a remote platform, and it securely supplies data to the service through simple techniques based on virtual memory. As a result, LAST-GT is general and applicable to many scenarios such as computational genomics and databases, as we show in our experimental evaluation based on an implementation of LAST-GT on a secure hypervisor. We also describe a possible implementation on Intel SGX.