SGX

Through the staggered release of Intel’s 6th Generation Core processors, known as Skylake, we reported in our architecture deep dive that Intel would be introducing a raft of known features, including Software Guard Extensions (SGX) among others. These extensions would allow programs to allocate a set of DRAM, resources and a runtime environment (known as an enclave) specifically for that software alone, such that other programs could not access its functions or violate its memory area through 0-day intrusions. At the time we were under the impression that the SGX extensions would be enabled across all Skylake CPUs (or at least a specific subset, similar to TXT) from day one, but some sleuthing from Tech Report has determined this is not the case. As described...