Title
NARRATOR: Secure and Practical State Continuity for Trusted Execution in the Cloud
Abstract
ABSTRACTPublic cloud platforms have leveraged Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology to provide confidential computing services. However, TEE-protected applications still suffer from rollback or forking attacks, in which their states could be rolled back to a stale version or be forked into multiple versions, resulting in state continuity violations. Existing solutions against these attacks either rely on weak threat models based on centralized trust (e.g., trusted server) or suffer from large performance overheads (e.g., tens of state updates per second). In this paper, we propose Narrator, a secure and practical system, (1) that relies on a blockchain (i.e., decentralized trust) and TEEs, and (2) that provides high-performance state continuity protection like unlimited and fast state updates for applications in cloud TEEs. The intuition behind our design is simple. Our design uses the blockchain to initialize a distributed system of TEEs, laying down the decentralized trust base with a small interaction overhead, while the distributed system provides performant state continuity protection. Our distributed system adopts a customized version of the consistent broadcast protocol and leverages advanced techniques to make state updates processed with one round trip delay on average. We build a proof-of-concept of Narrator on Intel SGX (i.e., a representative design of TEEs) and do extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. Our evaluation results show that in a LAN environment with 5 nodes, Narrator can support about 6k state updates per second, meanwhile keeping the latency as low as 3-8 ms. The throughput is 30x larger than that in ROTE and 70x larger than using a TPM counter.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3548606.3560620
Computer and Communications Security
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Niu Jianyu122.40
Wei Peng200.34
Xiaokuan Zhang300.34
Yinqian Zhang494548.00