SENSE: Enhancing Microarchitectural Awareness for TEEs via Subscription-Based Notification
Fan Sang
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 · Day 2 · TEE & SGX Security
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are critical for securing sensitive computations, but they face a persistent and formidable adversary in **side-channel attacks (SCAs)**. Despite continuous advancements in defense mechanisms, effectively mitigating these attacks remains a significant challenge. Current detection-based approaches often falter against sophisticated, stealthy attacks that leak small portions of secrets over multiple executions, as they primarily rely on observing abnormal victim performance characteristics. The core problem lies in the inherent information asymmetry: attackers can gather a wealth of microarchitectural signals, even from privileged kernel space, while the victim inside the TEE remains largely blind.