Composite Enclaves: Towards Disaggregated Trusted Execution

Understand

The ever-rising computation demand is forcing the move from the CPU to heterogeneous specialized hardware, which is readily available across modern datacenters through disaggregated infrastructure.

• On the other hand, trusted execution environments (TEEs), one of the most promising recent developments in hardware security, can only protect code confined in the CPU, limiting TEEs' potential and applicability to a handful of applications.
• We observe that the TEEs' hardware trusted computing base (TCB) is fixed at design time, which in practice leads to using untrusted software to employ peripherals in TEEs.
• Based on this observation, we propose \emph{composite enclaves} with a configurable hardware and software TCB, allowing enclaves access to multiple computing and IO resources.