Technion researchers and their colleagues abroad have broken through Intel’s innovative security wall, Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX). SGX is a recently introduced security feature of Intel processors for protecting the privacy and integrity of information and applications on the computer. It is available in all recent Intel processors, and is broadly deployed in both personal computers and cloud computing services.

The attack, dubbed Foreshadow, exploits certain weaknesses in the existing mechanisms of Intel CPUs, allowing an attacker to expose private application data and forge computations secured by SGX.

The researchers reported Foreshadow to Intel in January of 2018. Further analysis into the causes of Foreshadow performed by Intel revealed that the same hardware flaw enables a number of other devastating attacks. Called Foreshadow –NG, these attacks put in risk the privacy of users of cloud computing systems that use Intel CPUs. The patches that mitigate these attacks have already been released.

The researchers from the Technion are Assistant Prof. Mark Silberstein of the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering and his graduate student Marina Minkin from the Computer Science Department. They conducted the study together with their colleagues from The University of Adelaide (Australia), The University of Michigan (USA) and KU Leuven (Belgium). Former Technion graduates Ophir Weiss and Assistant Prof. Daniel Genkin were also involved in the research. The team’s work will be presented tomorrow (August 15, 2018) at the leading security conference, USENIX Security ’18, in Baltimore, Maryland.

SGX is a revolutionary hardware technology that enables creation of secure execution environments, called secure enclaves. According to Prof. Silberstein, SGX has a wide range of potential applications. “Let’s say a company such as Netflix is interested in guaranteeing that its customers may watch movies only via Netflix’s own video streaming application to prevent illegal copies of the streamed contents. How to ensure that the client does not hack into the application, dumps its memory, or replaces it with a reverse-engineered version, given that the computer is entirely under her control?”

With SGX, Netflix servers can verify that the client application is invoked in a secure enclave that runs genuine Netflix software, and only then start transferring the movie. Moreover, SGX automatically encrypts all the information in the enclave’s memory with a unique key hardware-protected key. “This way, only the Netflix client, and no other applications on the computer, not even a computer administrator, may access the movie in the computer’s memory, as long as the processor hardware itself is not compromised.” SGX is also useful for cloud computing systems that rent remote computers by an hour, because SGX allows their users to trust the computations performed on remote cloud computers as if they were their own. Therefore, leading cloud computing vendors including IBM, Google, and Microsoft have already announced products that rely on SGX.

But the Foreshadow attack breaks these essential SGX security guarantees.
Researchers managed to read all the information stored in the enclave — the information that the user assumes is confidential. Moreover, Foreshadow compromised the secure storage mechanisms upon which the mechanism for validating the authenticity of a remote enclave is built, enabling the researchers to forge the programs running in the enclave. In other words, Foreshadow compromises core security guarantees provided by SGX, toppling large part of the entire SGX ecosystem by exploiting a single critical hardware vulnerability.

Dr. Daniel Genkin and Dr. Yuval Yarom, two of the researchers who discovered Foreshadow, were also involved in the discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that rocked the world in January 2018. That disclosure required Intel to distribute security updates to about 90% of the processors it had sold over the past five years. Foreshadow is a Meltdown-style attack too — the first such attack on Intel SGX.

For a video about this research, click here.

The current study is supported by the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara Cyber Security Research Center (Prof. Silberstein is the head of Center’s Scientific Committee), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Commerce, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Ariane de Rothschild Women Doctoral Program, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

For more than a century, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has pioneered in science and technology education and delivered world-changing impact. Proudly a global university, the Technion has long leveraged boundary-crossing collaborations to advance breakthrough research and technologies. Now with a presence in three countries, the Technion will prepare the next generation of global innovators. Technion people, ideas and inventions make immeasurable contributions to the world, innovating in fields from cancer research and sustainable energy to quantum computing and computer science to do good around the world.

The American Technion Society supports visionary education and world-changing impact through the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Based in New York City, we represent thousands of US donors, alumni and stakeholders who invest in the Technion’s growth and innovation to advance critical research and technologies that serve the State of Israel and the global good. Over more than 75 years, our nationwide supporter network has funded new Technion scholarships, research, labs and facilities that have helped deliver world-changing contributions and extend Technion education to campuses in three countries.

For more than a century, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has pioneered in science and technology education and delivered world-changing impact. Proudly a global university, the Technion has long leveraged boundary-crossing collaborations to advance breakthrough research and technologies. Now with a presence in three countries, the Technion will prepare the next generation of global innovators. Technion people, ideas and inventions make immeasurable contributions to the world, innovating in fields from cancer research and sustainable energy to quantum computing and computer science to do good around the world.

The American Technion Society supports visionary education and world-changing impact through the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Based in New York City, we represent thousands of US donors, alumni and stakeholders who invest in the Technion’s growth and innovation to advance critical research and technologies that serve the State of Israel and the global good. Over more than 75 years, our nationwide supporter network has funded new Technion scholarships, research, labs, and facilities that have helped deliver world-changing contributions and extend Technion education to campuses in three countries.