Everything You Should Know About Intel SGX Performance on Virtualized Systems

Intel SGX has attracted much attention from academia and is already powering commercial applications. Cloud providers have also started implementing SGX in their cloud offerings. Research efforts on Intel SGX so far have mainly concentrated on its security and programmability. However, no work has studied in detail the performance degradation caused by SGX in virtualized systems. Such settings are particularly important, considering that virtualization is the de facto building block of cloud infrastructure, yet often comes with a performance impact. This paper presents for the first time a detailed performance analysis of Intel SGX in a virtualized system in comparison with a bare-metal system. Based on our findings, we identify several optimization strategies that would improve the performance of Intel SGX on such systems.