ReTEE

Restoring Trust in Trusted Execution Environments

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) play a critical role in ensuring the security and confidentiality of multi-tenant cloud environments. While traditional sandboxing techniques can provide separation between services, they rely on a trusted operating system (OS) and hypervisor to enforce isolation. Cloud providers control the hypervisors and the underlying hardware, giving them the highest privilege level in the system. If a malicious or compromised provider gains access, virtualization alone cannot guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of workloads. To address this challenge, TEEs provide a more robust alternative by ensuring that even privileged system components, including the operating system and hypervisor, cannot access or tamper with protected workloads. However, numerous side-channel attacks have challenged the reliability of these environments and raised concerns about their resilience to sophisticated threats. To restore confidence in TEEs, ReTEE aims to provide enclave developers with advanced tools to create highly secure code that can safely run inside TEEs. Such automated tools for applying side-channel protections to large code bases significantly reduce the risk of security breaches.

 

This project is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).