Related papers: Heckler: Breaking Confidential VMs with Malicious …
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has shifted communication networks towards more adaptable software solutions, but this transition raises new security concerns, particularly in public cloud deployments. While Intel's Software Guard…
Confidential computing in the public cloud intends to safeguard workload privacy while outsourcing infrastructure management to a cloud provider. This is achieved by executing customer workloads within so called Trusted Execution…
This paper presents C8s, a confidential computing architecture for Kubernetes that provides cryptographically rooted confidentiality, integrity, and verifiability guarantees for Kubernetes clusters from infrastructure operators. These…
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are gradually adopted by major cloud providers, offering a practical option of \emph{confidential computing} for users who don't fully trust public clouds. TEEs use CPU-enabled hardware features to…
Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption…
Using cloud-based applications comes with privacy implications, as the end-user looses control over their data. While encrypting all data on the client is possible, it largely reduces the usefulness of database management systems (DBMS)…
Trust is of paramount concern for tenants to deploy their security-sensitive services in the cloud. The integrity of VMs in which these services are deployed needs to be ensured even in the presence of powerful adversaries with…
In the last two decades, the evolving cyber-threat landscape has brought to center stage the contentious tradeoffs between the security and performance of modern microprocessors. The guarantees provided by the hardware to ensure no…
In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware. Additionally, in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on…
Modern data centers have grown beyond CPU nodes to provide domain-specific accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs to their customers. From a security standpoint, cloud customers want to protect their data. They are willing to pay additional…
As an emerging technique for confidential computing, trusted execution environment (TEE) receives a lot of attention. To better develop, deploy, and run secure applications on a TEE platform such as Intel's SGX, both academic and industrial…
Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) protect data in use by running workloads within hardware-enforced Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). However, existing CVM attestation mechanisms only certify what code is running, not where it is…
Trusted Platform Modules constitute an integral building block of modern security features. Moreover, as Windows 11 made a TPM 2.0 mandatory, they are subject to an ever-increasing academic challenge. While discrete TPMs - as found in…
In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…
There is an urgent demand for privacy-preserving techniques capable of supporting compute and data intensive (CDI) computing in the era of big data. However, none of existing TEEs can truly support CDI computing tasks, as CDI requires high…
Agentic AI systems, specifically LLM-driven agents that plan, invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and delegate tasks to peer agents via protocols such as MCP and A2A, introduce a threat surface that differs materially from standalone…
Security and privacy concerns in computer systems have grown in importance with the ubiquity of connected devices. TEEs provide security guarantees based on cryptographic constructs built in hardware. Intel software guard extensions (SGX),…
Hardware-enclaves that target complex CPU designs compromise both security and performance. Programs have little control over micro-architecture, which leads to side-channel leaks, and then have to be transformed to have worst-case control-…
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) introduced new instructions to switch the processor to enclave mode which protects it from introspection. While the enclave mode strongly protects the memory and the state of the processor, it cannot…
Modern virtualized service infrastructures expose attack vectors that enable attacks of high severity, such as attacks targeting hypervisors. A malicious user of a guest VM (virtual machine) may execute an attack against the underlying…