SENSE: Enhancing Microarchitectural Awareness for TEEs via Subscription-Based Notification

Effectively mitigating side-channel attacks (SCAs) in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) remains challenging despite advances in existing defenses. Current detection-based defenses hinge on observing abnormal victim performance characteristics but struggle to detect attacks leaking smaller portions of the secret across multiple executions. Limitations of existing detection-based defenses stem from various factors, including the absence of a trusted microarchitectural data source in TEEs, low-quality available data, inflexibility of victim responses, and platform-specific constraints. We contend that the primary obstacles to effective detection techniques can be attributed to the lack of direct access to precise microarchitectural information within TEEs.

We propose SENSE, a solution that actively exposes underlying microarchitectural information to userspace TEEs. SENSE enables userspace software in TEEs to subscribe to fine-grained microarchitectural events and utilize the events as a means to contextualize the ongoing microarchitectural states. We initially demonstrate SENSE’s capability by applying it to defeat the state-of-the-art cache-based side-channel attacks. We conduct a comprehensive security analysis to ensure that SENSE does not leak more information than a system without it does. We prototype SENSE on a gem5-based emulator, and our evaluation shows that SENSE is secure, can effectively defeats cache SCAs, and incurs negligible performance overhead (1.2%) under benign situations.