  Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a promising hardware-based
technology for protecting sensitive computations from potentially compromised
system software. However, recent research has shown that SGX is vulnerable to
branch-shadowing -- a side channel attack that leaks the fine-grained (branch
granularity) control flow of an enclave (SGX protected code), potentially
revealing sensitive data to the attacker. The previously-proposed defense
mechanism, called Zigzagger, attempted to hide the control flow, but has been
shown to be ineffective if the attacker can single-step through the enclave
using the recent SGX-Step framework.
  Taking into account these stronger attacker capabilities, we propose a new
defense against branch-shadowing, based on control flow randomization. Our
scheme is inspired by Zigzagger, but provides quantifiable security guarantees
with respect to a tunable security parameter. Specifically, we eliminate
conditional branches and hide the targets of unconditional branches using a
combination of compile-time modifications and run-time code randomization.
  We evaluated the performance of our approach by measuring the run-time
overhead of ten benchmark programs of SGX-Nbench in SGX environment.

Cryptography and Security