OBLIVIATE: A Data Oblivious File System for Intel SGX

Abstract

Intel SGX provides confidentiality and integrity of a program running within the confines of an enclave, and is expected to enable valuable security applications such as private information retrieval. This paper is concerned with the security aspects of SGX in accessing a key system resource, files. Through concrete attack scenarios, we show that all existing SGX filesystems are vulnerable to either system call snooping, page fault, or cache based side-channel attacks. To address this security limitations in current SGX filesystems, we present OBLIVIATE, a data oblivious filesystem for Intel SGX. The key idea behind OBLIVIATE is in adapting the ORAM protocol to read and write data from a file within an SGX enclave. OBLIVIATE redesigns the conceptual components of ORAM for SGX environments, and it seamlessly supports an SGX program without requiring any changes in the application layer. OBLIVIATE also employs SGX-specific defenses and optimizations in order to ensure complete security with acceptable overhead. The evaluation of the prototype of OBLIVIATE demonstrated its practical effectiveness in running popular server applications such as SQLite and Lighttpd, while also achieving a throughput improvement of 2x-8x over a baseline ORAM-based solution, and less than 2x overhead over an in-memory SGX filesystem.