Intel SGX Explained
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a set of extensions to the Intel architecture that aims to provide integrity and confidentiality guarantees to securitysensitive computation performed on a computer where all the privileged software (kernel, hypervisor, etc) is potentially malicious. This paper analyzes Intel SGX, based on the 3 papers [14, 78, 137] that introduced it, on the Intel Software Developer's Manual [100] (which supersedes the SGX manuals [94, 98] on an ISCA 2015 tutorial [102] and on two patents [108, 136] We use the papers, reference manuals, and tutorial as primary data sources, and only draw on the patents to fill in missing information. This paper's contributions are a summary of the Intel specific architectural and micro architectural details needed to understand SGX, a detailed and structured presentation of the publicly available information on SGX, a series of intelligent guesses about some important but undocumented aspects of SGX, and an analysis of SGX's security properties.
IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch.