Martin Unterguggenberger (Graz University of Technology), Lukas Lamster (Graz University of Technology), David Schrammel (Graz University of Technology), Martin Schwarzl (Cloudflare, Inc.), Stefan Mangard (Graz University of Technology)

Efficient cloud computing relies on in-process isolation to optimize performance by running workloads within a single process. Without heavy-weight process isolation, memory safety errors pose a significant security threat by allowing an adversary to extract or corrupt the private data of other co-located tenants. Existing in-process isolation mechanisms are not suitable for modern cloud requirements, e.g., MPK’s 16 protection domains are insufficient to isolate thousands of cloud workers per process. Consequently, cloud service providers have a strong need for lightweight in-process isolation on commodity x86 machines.

This paper presents TME-Box, a novel isolation technique that enables fine-grained and scalable sandboxing on commodity x86 CPUs. By repurposing Intel TME-MK, which is intended for the encryption of virtual machines, TME-Box offers lightweight and efficient in-process isolation. TME-Box enforces that sandboxes use their designated encryption keys for memory interactions through compiler instrumentation. This cryptographic isolation enables fine-grained access control, from single cache lines to full pages, and supports flexible data relocation. In addition, the design of TME-Box allows the efficient isolation of up to 32K concurrent sandboxes. We present a performance-optimized TME-Box prototype, utilizing x86 segment-based addressing, that showcases geomean performance overheads of 5.2 % for data isolation and 9.7 % for code and data isolation, evaluated with the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite.

View More Papers

SketchFeature: High-Quality Per-Flow Feature Extractor Towards Security-Aware Data Plane

Sian Kim (Ewha Womans University), Seyed Mohammad Mehdi Mirnajafizadeh (Wayne State University), Bara Kim (Korea University), Rhongho Jang (Wayne State University), DaeHun Nyang (Ewha Womans University)

Read More

Safety Misalignment Against Large Language Models

Yichen Gong (Tsinghua University), Delong Ran (Tsinghua University), Xinlei He (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)), Tianshuo Cong (Tsinghua University), Anyu Wang (Tsinghua University), Xiaoyun Wang (Tsinghua University)

Read More

Five Word Password Composition Policy

Sirvan Almasi (Imperial College London), William J. Knottenbelt (Imperial College London)

Read More

BULKHEAD: Secure, Scalable, and Efficient Kernel Compartmentalization with PKS

Yinggang Guo (State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University; University of Minnesota), Zicheng Wang (State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University), Weiheng Bai (University of Minnesota), Qingkai Zeng (State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University), Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota)

Read More