ReplicaTEE: Enabling Seamless Replication of SGX Enclaves in the Cloud

With the proliferation of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) such as Intel SGX, a number of cloud providers will soon introduce TEE capabilities within their offering (e.g., Microsoft Azure). The integration of SGX within the cloud considerably strengthens the threat model for cloud applications. However, cloud deployments depend on the ability of the cloud operator to add and remove application dynamically; this is no longer possible given the current model to deploy and provision enclaves that actively involves the application owner. In this paper, we propose ReplicaTEE, a solution that enables seamless commissioning and decommissioning of TEE-based applications in the cloud. ReplicaTEE leverages an SGX-based provisioning service that interfaces with a Byzantine Fault-Tolerant storage service to securely orchestrate enclave replication in the cloud, without the active intervention of the application owner. Namely, in ReplicaTEE, the application owner entrusts application secret to the provisioning service; the latter handles all enclave commissioning and decommissioning operations throughout the application lifetime. We analyze the security of ReplicaTEE and show that it is secure against attacks by a powerful adversary that can compromise a large fraction of the cloud infrastructure. We implement a prototype of ReplicaTEE in a realistic cloud environment and evaluate its performance. ReplicaTEE moderately increments the TCB by approximately 800 LoC. Our evaluation shows that ReplicaTEE does not add significant overhead to existing SGX-based applications.