Squad: A Secure, Simple Storage Service for SGX-Based Microservices

Intel SGX has been the subject of numerous research and development projects. Moreover, this technology has been considered a robust option to secure the data being processed in cloud environments. Despite this, configuring SGX-based applications in complex and dynamic scenarios such as microservice architectures is still a challenge. The process of configuring such applications must guarantee the trustworthiness of the services, and must be simple and efficient. We then propose a solution for configuring and provisioning secrets to SGX-based applications made with help from the Intel SGX SDK. We present a simple solution that can be easily validated and hardened. Also, the solution is pluggable and can be extended to fit specific requirements or leverage other tools (e.g., for data persistence). In addition to describing our proposal, we also provide an evaluation that shows low overhead to the initialization and configuration time of SGX microservices deployed on Kubernetes. This work contributes to the state-of-the-art of the usage of trusted execution environments in cloud computing.