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On Real-Time Guarantees in Intel SGX and TDX

Authors Peterson Yuhala , Christian Göttel , Jämes Ménétrey , Valerio Schiavoni , David Kozhaya , Pascal Felber

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LIPIcs.ECRTS.2025.8.pdf
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ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Trusted computing
  • Computer systems organization → Real-time system architecture
Keywords
  • Trusted execution environments
  • Real-time systems
  • Intel SGX
  • Intel TDX
  • WebAssembly

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Abstract

Trusted execution environments (TEE) represent a major technological breakthrough that provide strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees for code and data running on potentially vulnerable or untrustworthy computing systems, such as cloud, edge, embedded, mobile, or even blockchain systems. However, the performance overhead associated with TEEs still poses a limitation on the extent to which real-time (RT) sensitive applications can benefit from this technology, e.g., to run on untrusted third-party infrastructures. This work investigates various TEE-based architectures spanning from process-based to virtual-machine-based implementations, for securing RT applications. It offers in addition an in-depth evaluation of these architectures, providing insights into how various TEE deployments influence the temporal compute and communication guarantees of RT systems.

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Peterson Yuhala, Christian Göttel, Jämes Ménétrey, Valerio Schiavoni, David Kozhaya, and Pascal Felber. On Real-Time Guarantees in Intel SGX and TDX. In 37th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 335, pp. 8:1-8:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2025.8

Author Details

Peterson Yuhala
  • Computer science department,University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Christian Göttel
  • Corporate Research Center, ABB Schweiz AG, Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland
Jämes Ménétrey
  • Computer science department, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Valerio Schiavoni
  • Computer science department, Universiy of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
David Kozhaya
  • Corporate Research Center, ABB Schweiz AG, Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland
Pascal Felber
  • Computer science department, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Supplementary Materials

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