Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Data Enclave: A Data-Centric Trusted Execution Environment

Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) is an important component of secure cloud computing, providing code to run in an enclave that is isolated from the cloud provider's infrastructure security vulnerabilities. As TEE gains more popularity, the inflexibility of its enclave becomes an apparent hindrance for its deployment with increasingly complex applications. In particular, current enclaves have a good compute abstraction, but lack data abstraction. This project will investigate a new data abstraction to allow data to exist and managed separately from an enclave. A good data abstraction for enclaves can address essential shortcomings of current enclaves: (i) lack of efficient support of inter-enclave communications and data sharing; (ii) lack of support for intra-enclave isolation; (iii) insufficient scalability. Addressing the lack of data abstraction will also help improve TEE's capabilities for CPU-GPU collaboration, multi-sockets, and memory disaggregation and pooling. The success of this project will enable secure enclaves to host a broader range of applications. Given that more and more computation is performed in the cloud, enabling more cloud applications to be protected improves the cloud security and privacy, and hence computing in general. The project has plans to encourage participation in the research by all K-12 and undergraduate students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2512737 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Yan Solihin | Institution: The University of Central Florida Board of Trustees, ORLANDO, FL | Award Amount: $500,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2512737 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2512737.html