Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) enable secure and trusted execution of user code in an isolated enclave to protect against a powerful adversary. Unfortunately, running I/O-intensive, memory-demanding server applications in enclaves leads to significant performance degradation. Such applications put a substantial load on the in-enclave system call and secure paging mechanisms, which turn out to be the main reason for the application slowdown. In addition to the high direct cost of thousands-of-cycles long SGX management instructions, these mechanisms incur the high indirect cost of enclave exits due to associated TLB flushes and processor state pollution.

We tackle these performance issues in Eleos by enabling exit-less system calls and exit-less paging in enclaves. Eleos introduces a novel Secure User-managed Virtual Memory (SUVM) abstraction that implements application-level paging inside the enclave. SUVM eliminates the overheads of enclave exits due to paging, and enables new optimizations such as sub-page granularity of accesses.

We thoroughly evaluate Eleos on a range of microbenchmarks and two real server applications, achieving notable system performance gains. memcached and a face verifi- cation server running in-enclave with Eleos, achieves up to 2.2x and 2.3x higher throughput respectively while working on datasets up to 5x larger than the enclave’s secure physical memory.

Link: https://0f675898-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/silbersteinmark/Home/cr-eurosys17sgx.pdf