NDSS 2025 – A Formal Approach To Multi-Layered Privileges For Enclaves

Session 7B: Trusted Hardware and Execution

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Ganxiana Yana (Shanghai Jiao Tona Universitv). Chenvana Liu (Shanghai Jiao Tong Universitv). Zhen Huana (Shanghai Jiao Tona Universitv). Guoxina Chen (Shanghail Ganxiang Yang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Chenyang Liu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Zhen Huang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Guoxing Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Hongfei Fu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yuanyuan Zhang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Hao|in Zhu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University PAPER
A Formal Approach to Multi-Layered Privileges for Enclaves Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) have been widely adopted as a protection approach for security-critical applications. Although feature extensions have been previously proposed to improve the usability of enclaves, their provision patterns are still confronted with security challenges. This paper presents Palantir, a verifiable multi-layered inter-enclave privilege model for secure feature extensions to enclaves. Specifically, a parent-children inter-enclave relationship, with which a parent enclave is granted two privileged permissions, the Execution Control and Spatial Control, over its children enclaves to facilitate secure feature extensions, is introduced. Moreover, by enabling nesting parent-children relationships, Palantir achieves multi-layered privileges (MLP) that allow feature extensions to be placed in various privilege layers following the Principle of Least Privilege. To prove the security of Palantir, we verified that our privilege model does not break or weaken the security guarantees of enclaves by building and verifying a formal model named TAPinfty. Furthermore, We implemented a prototype of Palantir on Penglai, an open-sourced RISC-V TEE platform.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosecurity.US authored by Marc Handelman. Read the original post at: https://www.infosecurity.us/blog/2025/12/26/ndss-2025-a-formal-approach-to-multi-layered-privileges-for-enclaves