An Experimental Evaluation of TEE technology Evolution: Benchmarking Transparent Approaches based on SGX, SEV, and TDX
<|reference_start|>An Experimental Evaluation of TEE technology Evolution: Benchmarking Transparent Approaches based on SGX, SEV, and TDX: Protection of data-in-use is a key priority, for which Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology has unarguably emerged as a, possibly the most, promising solution. Multiple server-side TEE offerings have been released over the years, exhibiting substantial differences with respect to several aspects. The first comer was Intel SGX, which featured Process-based TEE protection, an efficient yet difficult to use approach. Some SGX limitations were (partially) overcome by runtimes, notably: Gramine, Scone, and Occlum. A major paradigm shift was later brought by AMD SEV, with VM-based TEE protection, which enabled lift-and-shift deployment of legacy applications. This new paradigm has been implemented by Intel only recently, in TDX. While the threat model of the aforementioned TEE solutions has been widely discussed, a thorough performance comparison is still lacking in the literature. This paper provides a comparative evaluation of TDX, SEV, Gramine-SGX, and Occlum-SGX. We study computational overhead and resource usage, under different operational scenarios and using a diverse suite of legacy applications. By doing so, we provide a reliable performance assessment under realistic conditions. We explicitly emphasize that, at the time of writing, TDX was not yet available to the public. Thus, the evaluation of TDX is a unique feature of this study.<|reference_end|>
@article{coppolino2024an,
    title={An Experimental Evaluation of TEE technology Evolution: Benchmarking
  Transparent Approaches based on SGX, SEV, and TDX},
    author={Luigi Coppolino, Salvatore D'Antonio, Davide Iasio, Giovanni Mazzeo,
  and Luigi Romano},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.00443},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.00443},
    primaryClass={cs.CR}
}