USENIX Security2020Top-tier venue
Achieving Keyless CDNs with Conclaves
Stephen Herwig, Christina Garman, Dave Levin
Abstract
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) serve a large and increasing portion of today's web content. Beyond caching, CDNs provide their customers with a variety of services, including protection against DDoS and targeted attacks. As the web shifts from HTTP to HTTPS, CDNs continue to provide such services by also assuming control of their customers' private keys, thereby breaking a fundamental security principle: private keys must only be known by their owner. We present the design and implementation of Phoenix, the first truly "keyless CDN". Phoenix uses secure enclaves (in particular Intel SGX) to host web content, store sensitive key material, apply web application firewalls, and more on otherwise untrusted machines. To support scalability and multitenancy, Phoenix is built around a new architectural primitive which we call conclaves: containers of enclaves. Conclaves make it straightforward to deploy multi-process, scalable, legacy applications. We also develop a filesystem to extend the enclave's security guarantees to untrusted storage. In its strongest configuration, Phoenix reduces the knowledge of the edge server to that of a traditional on-path HTTPS adversary. We evaluate the performance of Phoenix with a series of micro-and macro-benchmarks. Contributions We make the following contributions: • We present the first truly "keyless CDN," which we call Phoenix. Phoenix performs all of the quintessential tasks
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Cited by top-tier papers7
- Confidential Serverless Made Efficient with Plug-In EnclavesMingyu Li, Yubin Xia, Haibo ChenISCA 2021 · 32 citations
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- Rakis: Secure Fast I/O Primitives Across Trust Boundaries on Intel SGXMansour Alharthi, Fan Sang, Dmitrii Kuvaiskii, Mona Vij et al.EuroSys 2025 · 6 citations
- Bento: safely bringing network function virtualization to TorMichael Reininger, Arushi Arora, Stephen Herwig, Nicholas Francino et al.SIGCOMM 2021 · 6 citations
- InviCloak: An End-to-End Approach to Privacy and Performance in Web Content DistributionShihan Lin, Rui Xin, Aayush Goel, Xiaowei YangCCS 2022 · 5 citations
Builds on4
- Foreshadow: Extracting the Keys to the Intel SGX Kingdom with Transient Out-of-Order ExecutionJo Van Bulck, Marina Minkin, Ofir Weisse, Daniel Genkin et al.USENIX Security 2018 · 1,175 citations
- Measuring HTTPS Adoption on the WebAdrienne Porter Felt, Richard Barnes, April King, Chris Palmer et al.USENIX Security 2017 · 177 citations
- Measurement and Analysis of Private Key Sharing in the HTTPS EcosystemFrank Cangialosi, Taejoong Chung, David R. Choffnes, Dave Levin et al.CCS 2016 · 89 citations
- CDN-on-Demand: An affordable DDoS Defense via Untrusted CloudsYossi Gilad, Amir Herzberg, Michael Sudkovitch, Michael GobermanNDSS 2016 · 59 citations
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