CI-P: Collaborative: Planning for a Community-Driven Open Research Infrastructure to Support Secure Computing Research involving Intel SGX

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Historically,when designing the security of a system, operating systems have been considered a part of the trusted computing base (TCB). However, with the recent shift to cloud computing, there is a pressing need to exclude the OS from the TCB. The Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a promising new technology that has a great potential to solve this problem. However, its infrastructure, tools, and development ecosystems are developed in a closed manner. This project is to initiate a community effort in developing an open research infrastructure and support for Intel SGX. In particular, the work will initiate a long-term plan to develop, enhance, and maintain an open source project, OpenSGX, focusing on developing a system emulator, SGX-enabled applications, libraries, kernel drivers, etc., to support its ecosystem. Being an open source research infrastructure, all of the code and documentation will be publicly shared and maintained.