TICAL: Trusted and Integrity-protected Compilation of AppLications

Research output: Contribution to conferencesPaperContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

During the past few years, we have witnessed various efforts to provide confidentiality and integrity for applications running in untrusted environments such as public clouds. In most of these approaches, hardware extensions such as Intel SGX, TDX, AMD SEV, etc., are leveraged to provide encryption and integrity protection on process or VM level. Although all of these approaches increase the trust in the application at runtime, an often overlooked aspect is the integrity and confidentiality protection at build time, which is equally important as maliciously injected code during compilation can compromise the entire application and system.In this paper, we present Tical, a practical framework for trusted compilation that provides integrity protection and confidentiality in build pipelines from source code to the final executable. Our approach harnesses TEEs as runtime protection but enriches TEEs with file system shielding and an immutable audit log with version history to provide accountability. This way, we can ensure that the compiler chain can only access trusted files and intermediate output, such as object files produced by trusted processes. Our evaluation using micro- and macro-benchmarks shows that Tical can protect the confidentiality and integrity of whole CI/CD pipelines with an acceptable performance overhead.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages25-32
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

TitleEuropean Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC)
Conference number
Duration8 - 11 April 2024
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
LocationLeuven
CityLeuven
CountryBelgium

External IDs

Scopus 85194821055
dblp conf/edcc/KrahnPGQBMF24
Mendeley 6b0df034-24cc-3199-ac42-e3ea843cf23c
ORCID /0000-0003-0768-6351/work/162345706

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

Keywords

  • Runtime, Codes, Files systems, Source coding, Pipelines, Europe, Hardware, Trusted Compilation, SGX, TEE, CI/CD, Confidential Computing