Sigy: Breaking Intel SGX Enclaves with Malicious Exceptions & Signals


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Date

2025

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Scopus:
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Data

Abstract

User programs recover from hardware exceptions and respond to signals by executing custom handlers that they register specifically for such events. We present Sigy attack, which abuses this programming model on Intel SGX to break the confidentiality and integrity guarantees of enclaves. Sigy uses the untrusted OS to deliver fake hardware events and injects fake signals in an enclave at any point. Such unintended execution of benign program-defined handlers in an enclave corrupts its state and violates execution integrity. 7 runtimes and library OSes (OpenEnclave, Gramine, Scone, Asylo, Teaclave, Occlum, EnclaveOS) are vulnerable to Sigy. 8 languages supported in Intel SGX have programming constructs that are vulnerable to Sigy. We use Sigy to demonstrate 4 proof of concept exploits on webservers (Nginx, Node.js) to leak secrets and data analytics workloads in different languages (C and Java) to break execution integrity.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

ASIA CCS '25: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

1643 - 1658

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Event

20th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CSS 2025)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

TEE; Intel SGX; Exception; Signal; Interrupt handling

Organisational unit

09730 - Shinde, Shweta Shivaji / Shinde, Shweta Shivaji check_circle

Notes

Funding

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