Re: RFC: userspace exception fixups

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2018 at 11:02:11AM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 10:41 AM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 11/6/18 10:20 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > > I almost feel like the right solution is to call into SGX on its own
> > > private stack or maybe even its own private address space.
> >
> > Yeah, I had the same gut feeling.  Couldn't the debugger even treat the
> > enclave like its own "thread" with its own stack and its own set of
> > registers and context?  That seems like a much more workable model than
> > trying to weave it together with the EENTER context.
> 
> So maybe the API should be, roughly
> 
> sgx_exit_reason_t sgx_enter_enclave(pointer_to_enclave, struct
> host_state *state);
> sgx_exit_reason_t sgx_resume_enclave(same args);
> 
> where host_state is something like:
> 
> struct host_state {
>   unsigned long bp, sp, ax, bx, cx, dx, si, di;
> };
> 
> and the values in host_state explicitly have nothing to do with the
> actual host registers.  So, if you want to use the outcall mechanism,
> you'd allocate some memory, point sp to that memory, call
> sgx_enter_enclave(), and then read that memory to do the outcall.
> 
> Actually implementing this would be distinctly nontrivial, and would
> almost certainly need some degree of kernel help to avoid an explosion
> when a signal gets delivered while we have host_state.sp loaded into
> the actual SP register.  Maybe rseq could help with this?
> 
> The ISA here is IMO not well thought through.

Maybe I'm mistaken about some fundamentals here, but my understanding
of SGX is that the whole point is that the host application and the
code running in the enclave are mutually adversarial towards one
another. Do any or all of the proposed protocols here account for this
and fully protect the host application from malicious code in the
enclave? It seems that having control over the register file on exit
from the enclave is fundamentally problematic but I assume there must
be some way I'm missing that this is fixed up.

Rich