ShieldBox: Secure Middleboxes using Shielded Execution

Middleboxes that process confidential data cannot be securely deployed in untrusted cloud environments. To securely outsource middleboxes to the cloud, state-of-the-art systems advocate network processing over the encrypted traffic. Unfortunately, these systems support only restrictive functionalities, and incur prohibitively high overheads.

This motivated the design of ShieldBox---a secure middlebox framework for deploying high-performance network functions (NFs) over untrusted commodity servers. ShieldBox securely processes encrypted traffic inside a secure container by leveraging shielded execution. More specifically, ShieldBox builds on hardware-assisted memory protection based on Intel SGX to provide strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees. For middlebox developers, ShieldBox exposes a generic interface based on Click to design and implement a wide-range of NFs using its out-of-the-box elements and C++ extensions. For network operators, ShieldBox provides configuration and attestation service for seamless and verifiable deployment of middleboxes. We have implemented ShieldBox supporting important end-to-end features required for secure network processing, and performance optimizations. Our extensive evaluation shows that ShieldBox achieves a near-native throughput and latency to securely process confidential data at line rate.