Software Guard Extensions

Intel SGX is a set of new instructions from Intel that allows user-level code to allocate private regions of memory, called enclaves, that unlike normal process memory is also protected from processes running at higher privilege levels.

Support for SGX in the CPU is indicated in CPUID "Structured Extended feature Leaf", EBX bit 02, but its availability to applications requires BIOS support and opt-in enabling which is not reflected in CPUID bits. This complicates the feature detection logic for applications.

Emulation of SGX was added to experimental version of QEMU system emulator in 2014. In 2015, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology released an open-source simulator known as OpenSGX.

It was introduced in 2015 with the sixth generation Intel Core microprocessors based on the Skylake microarchitecture.

The introduction of SGX has a large impact on the security industry. It shifts how security is being achieved and lowers the attack surface area of projects. One example of SGX used in security was a demo application from wolfSSL using it for cryptography algorithms. An additional example is Numecent using SGX to protect the DRM that is used to authorize application execution with their Cloudpaging application delivery products.

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