ENGRAFT: Enclave-guarded Raft on Byzantine Faulty Nodes

This paper presents the first critical analysis of building highly secure, performant, and confidential Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus by integrating off-the-shelf crash fault-tolerant (CFT) protocols with trusted execution environments (TEEs). TEEs, like Intel SGX, are CPU extensions that offer applications a secure execution environment with strong integrity and confidentiality guarantees, by leveraging techniques like hardware-assisted isolation, memory encryption, and remote attestation. It has been speculated that when implementing a CFT protocol inside Intel SGX, one would achieve security properties similar to BFT. However, we show in this work that simply combining CFT with SGX does not directly yield a secure BFT protocol, given the wide range of attack vectors on SGX. We systematically study the fallacies in such a strawman design by performing model checking, and propose solutions to enforce safety and liveness. We also present Engraft, a secure enclave-guarded Raft implementation that, firstly, achieves consensus on a cluster of 2𝑓 + 1 machines tolerating up to 𝑓 nodes exhibiting Byzantine-fault behavior (but well-behaved enclaves); secondly, offers a new abstraction of confidential consensus for privacy-preserving state machine replication; and finally, allows the reuse of a production-quality Raft implementation, BRaft, in the development of a highly performant BFT system. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security; Formal security models.