Towards Interoperable Enclave Attestation: Learnings from Decades of Academic Work

Secure enclave technology has during the last decade emerged as an important hardware security primitive in server computer cores, and increasingly also in chips intended for consumer devices like mobile phones and PCs. The local or remote user of the enclave will rely on attestation protocols to confirm the isolation and other security properties of the enclave. In this paper, we analyze different attestation architectures and techniques as well as ways to present attestation evidence and metrics. We find that existing industry efforts to make attestation interoperable across platforms and trust roots can benefit from the wealth of research around remote attestation that has taken place since the 1990’s.