Manual code review finds 35 vulnerabilities in 8 enclave SDKs

guest · Nov 13, 2019

Manual code review finds 35 vulnerabilities in 8 enclave SDKs
November 12, 2019
https://www.zdnet.com/article/manual-code-review-finds-35-vulnerabilities-in-8-enclave-sdks/

A team of British and Belgium academics looked at eight open-source enclave SDKs and found 35 vulnerabilities that can be exploited to run malicious code inside a computer's most secure area.
A trusted execution environment (TEE), also known as an enclave, is a secure area of a CPU that can be isolated at the hardware or software level from the rest of the computer.

Currently, enclaves are supported by various underlying hardware-based technologies such as Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), ARM's TrustZone, RISC-V's Keystone, Qualcomm's Secure Execution Environment (QSEE), or KU Leuven's Sancus.
These SDKs provide an interface so an app can interact with the underlying enclave technology. But besides interfacing, the role of these SDKs is to also shield the enclave at a software level from malicious code that may be running at the OS level.
VULNERABILITIES ARE FULLY EXPLOITABLE, NOT JUST THEORETICAL
In total, researchers said their manual code audit found 35 vulnerabilities across all the eight SDKs, of which, five received a CVE identifier.

"We practically exploit these vulnerabilities in several attack scenarios to leak secret keys from the enclave or enable remote code reuse," the research team said, describing the severity of the vulnerabilities they found.
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All issues were reported to their respective SDK vendors earlier this year, and the research team said they worked with the project maintainers to fix all vulnerabilities.
Following their presentation, proof-of-concept code to reproduce the vulnerabilities will be released on GitHub, along with a whitepaper, entitled "A Tale of Two Worlds: Assessing the Vulnerability of Enclave Shielding Runtimes."
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