Trustworthy Computing

Members of the group

Prof. Dr. Ghassan Karame, Annika Wilde

Partners

NEC Laboratories Europe

Description

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) enable applications to execute in isolation from other software on the same platform, including the OS. Technologies, such as Intel SGX, allow to run applications in so-called enclaves and provide them with encrypted runtime memory, encrypted storage, and mechanisms to issue authenticated statements on the
enclave software configuration. As such, a number of practitioners believe that TEEs are particularly suited for cloud deployments since it allows to outsource applications to the cloud, with the assurance that outsourced applications run untampered and their data is not available to any (privileged) software on the same host. In this project, we first explore how to secure TEEs themselves against attacks. We also explore how to make use of trusted hardware support to improve the security and privacy of existing decentralized platforms, as a means to boostrap truly trustworthy environments.