Nimble: Rollback Protection for Confidential Cloud Services (extended version)

Sebastian Angel; Aditya Basu; Weidong Cui; Trent Jaeger; Stella Lau; Srinath Setty; Sudheesh Singanamalla

Paper 2023/761

Nimble: Rollback Protection for Confidential Cloud Services (extended version)

Sebastian Angel

Aditya Basu

Weidong Cui

Trent Jaeger

Stella Lau

Srinath Setty, Microsoft Research

Sudheesh Singanamalla

Abstract

This paper introduces Nimble, a cloud service that helps applications running in trusted execution environments (TEEs) to detect rollback attacks (i.e., detect whether a data item retrieved from persistent storage is the latest version). To achieve this, Nimble realizes an append-only ledger service by employing a simple state machine running in a TEE in conjunction with a crash fault-tolerant storage service. Nimble then replicates this trusted state machine to ensure the system is available even if a minority of state machines crash. A salient aspect of Nimble is a new reconfiguration protocol that allows a cloud provider to replace the set of nodes running the trusted state machine whenever it wishes—without affecting safety. We have formally verified Nimble’s core protocol in Dafny, and have implemented Nimble such that its trusted state machine runs in multiple TEE platforms (Intel SGX and AMD SNP-SEV). Our results show that a deployment of Nimble on machines running in different availability zones can achieve from tens of thousands of requests/sec with an end-to-end latency of under 3.2 ms (based on an in-memory key-value store) to several thousands of requests/sec with a latency of 30ms (based on Azure Table).

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. USENIX OSDI
Keywords: confidential computing rollback protection
Contact author(s): srinath @ microsoft com
History: 2023-05-30: approved; 2023-05-25: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/761
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/761,
      author = {Sebastian Angel and Aditya Basu and Weidong Cui and Trent Jaeger and Stella Lau and Srinath Setty and Sudheesh Singanamalla},
      title = {Nimble: Rollback Protection for Confidential Cloud Services (extended version)},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/761},
      year = {2023},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/761}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/761}
}