Hardening Application Security Using Intel SGX

Abstract

The release of Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) refueled the interest in trusted computing approaches across industry and academia. The corresponding hardware is available, but practical usage patterns and applications are still lacking notable prevalence rates. This paper addresses this gap by approaching trusted computing from the point of view of a software engineer. To help developers in overcoming the initial hurdles of integrating SGX with existing code bases, a small helper library is presented. Furthermore, hardening strategies are identified and applied in a case study based on the simple KISSDB database, demonstrating how SGX can be used in practice.