6. Securing Time in Untrusted Operating Systems with TimeSeal
Abstract—An accurate sense of elapsed time is essential for the safe and correct operation of hardware,
software, and networked systems. Unfortunately, an adversary can manipulate the system’s time and violate
causality, consistency, and scheduling properties of underlying applications. Although cryptographic
techniques are used to secure data, they cannot ensure time security as securing a time source is much more
challenging, given that the result of inquiring time must be delivered in a timely fashion. In this paper, we
first describe general attack vectors that can compromise a system’s sense of time. To counter these attacks,
we propose a secure time architecture, TIMESEAL that leverages a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
to secure time-based primitives. While CPU security features of TEEs secure code and data in protected
memory, we show that time sources available in TEE are still prone to OS attacks. TIMESEAL puts forward
a high-resolution time source that protects against the OS delay and scheduling attacks. Our TIMESEAL
prototype is based on Intel SGX and provides sub-millisecond (msec) resolution as compared to 1-second
resolution of SGX trusted time. It also securely bounds the relative time accuracy to msec under OS attacks.
In essence, TIMESEAL provides the capability of trusted timestamping and trusted scheduling to critical
applications in the presence of a strong adversary. It delivers all temporal use cases pertinent to secure
sensing, computing, and actuating in networked systems
7. Using Intel SGX to Protect Authentication Credentials in an Untrusted Operating System
Abstract—An important principle in computational security is to reduce the attack surface, by maintaining
the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) small. Even so, no security technique ensures full protection against any
adversary. Thus, sensitive applications should be designed with several layers of protection so that, even if a
layer might be violated, sensitive content will not be compromised. In 2015, Intel released the Software
Guard Extensions (SGX) technology in its processors. This mechanism allows applications to allocate
enclaves, which are private memory regions that can hold code and data. Other applications and even
privileged code, like the OS kernel and the BIOS, are not able to access enclaves’ contents. This paper
presents a novel password file protection scheme, which uses Intel SGX to protect authentication credentials
in the PAM authentication framework, commonly used in UNIX systems. We defined and implemented an
SGX-enabled version of the pam_unix.so authentication module, called UniSGX. This module uses an SGX
enclave to handle the credentials informed by the user and to check them against the password file. To add
an extra security layer, the password file is stored using SGX sealing. A threat model was proposed to assess
the security of the proposed solution. The obtained results show that the proposed solution is secure against
the threat model considered, and that its performance overhead is acceptable from the user point of view.
The scheme presented here is also suitable to other authentication frameworks.
8. Dynamic VM Scaling: Provisioning and Pricing through an Online Auction
Abstract—Today’s IaaS clouds allow dynamic scaling of VMs allocated to a user, according to real-time
demand of the user. There are two types of scaling: horizontal scaling (scale-out) by allocating more VM
instances to the user, and vertical scaling (scale-up) by boosting resources of VMs owned by the user. It has
been a daunting issue how to efficiently allocate the resources on physical servers to meet the scaling
demand of users on the go, which achieves the best server utilization and user utility. An accompanying
critical challenge is how to effectively charge the incremental resources, such that the economic benefits of
both the cloud provider and cloud users are guaranteed. There has been online auction design dealing with
dynamic VM provisioning, where the resource bids are not related to each other, failing to handle VM
scaling where later bids may rely on earlier bids of the same user. As the first in the literature, this paper
designs an efficient, truthful online auction for resource provisioning and pricing in the practical cases of
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