EnclaveCache: A Secure and Scalable Key-value Cache in Multi-tenant Clouds using Intel SGX

With in-memory key-value caches such as Redis and Memcached being a key component for many systems to improve throughput and reduce latency, cloud caches have been widely adopted for small companies to deploy their own cache systems. However, data security is still a major concern, which affects the adoption of cloud caches. Tenant’s data stored in a multi-tenant cloud environment faces threats from both co-located other tenants, as well as the untrusted cloud provider. We proposed EnclaveCache, which is a multi-tenant key-value cache that provides data confidentiality and privacy leveraging Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). EnclaveCache utilizes multiple SGX enclaves to enforce data isolation among co-located tenants. With a carefully designed key distribution procedure, EnclaveCache ensures that a tenant-specific encryption key is securely guarded by an enclave to perform cryptography operations towards tenant’s data. Experimental results show that EnclaveCache achieves comparable performance to traditional key-value caches (with secure communication) with a performance overhead of 13% while ensuring security guarantees and better scalability.