[ljhsiung]

I know its fun and popular to trash on SGX (and Intel specifically) but one thing I feel is that, in the hardware world, we don't really have the tooling infrastructure nor methodologies to provide a lot of the guarantees we make for security features that we might for "normal" features, say, coherence protocols or exception handling.

I like to draw parallels with the '90s and all of the Pentium bugs. These events really really lit a fire under Intel's ass to get their crap working. Cue decades worth of research and $$$ into formal verif, EDA tooling, and perhaps most importantly, organizational ownership.

Software models, where many security paradigms have been explored decently, don't map too well or don't have a great solution, like fuzzing or linters. So it's kinda hard to provide various security guarantees if you don't have tooling to verify them. Plus, the tools that do exist require domain expertise from the engineer, so the thought to look for some MMIO exploit will never occur to a cache designer.

This kinda turned into a ramble, but ultimately, while I agree I wish Intel would do better, I can't fully fault them since I feel like the whole industry is ill-equipped to provide these security guarantees. Spectre has started some efforts, but it's slow to pickup, which is why it's rather patchwork-y still. Frankly, it kinda feels like the only thing that'll kick asses into gear is some lawsuits, F00F and FDIV style.

P.S. A couple questions--

1) Would you happen to have the "EGX" framework you wrote in Appendix A? That seems massively useful.

2) Can I just screenshot the rubber duck NFT? :)