Securely deploying distributed computation systems on peer-to-peer networks

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. More and more off-the-shelf processors support the dynamic construction of Trusted Execution Environments. For instance, Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) supports the construction of so-called enclaves on modern Intel Core processors. Hence, it is interesting to design and evaluate practical security architectures that leverage this new technology. One of the possibilities of this new technology is that it enables deployment of traditional distributed applications that require a group of mutually trusting machines, on top of a group of mutually distrusting machines such as a peer-to-peer network. This paper proposes and evaluates an Intel SGX based approach to securely deploy a subset of distributed systems called distributed computation systems in a peer-to-peer fashion, with strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees and without modification of the original system. The approach is evaluated by applying it to distcc, a distributed compiler. This result of this process is a new program called p2pcc, a distributed peer-to-peer compiler. We created two different versions of p2pcc. In the first version, any process spawned on one of the untrusted peers runs in its own enclave, thus providing a very fine-grained form of isolation. Our evaluation shows that the performance cost on today's Intel SGX implementation is too high. The second version of p2pcc groups all processes running on behalf of the same user within the same enclave, thus providing coarser isolation, but still providing strong isolation on all security boundaries. Our evaluation shows that the second approach has good performance while providing strong security guarantees even on current SGX processors. Our results provide evidence that deploying existing distributed computation systems in a peer-to-peer fashion is practical.

ISBN:978-1-4503-5933-7

Publication year:2019

BOF-keylabel:yes

IOF-keylabel:yes

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open