inclavare-containers

Introduction

inclavare-containers is a set of tools for running trusted applications in containers with the hardware-assisted enclave technology. Enclave, referred to as a protected execution environment, prevents the untrusted entity from accessing the sensitive and confidential assets in use.

Components

rune

rune is a CLI tool for spawning and running enclaves in containers according to the OCI specification. The codebase of rune is a fork of runc, so rune can be used as runc if enclave is not configured or available.

rune currently supports the Linux platform with x86-64 architecture only. It must be built with Go version 1.14 or higher.

rune depends on protobuf compiler. Please refer to this guide to install it on your platform. Additionally, rune by default enables seccomp support as runc so you need to install libseccomp on your platform. Note that the libseccomp is also required in container environment, and the host version should be equal or higher than the one in container.

# create $WORKSPACE folder
mkdir -p "$WORKSPACE"
cd "$WORKSPACE"
git clone https://github.com/alibaba/inclavare-containers
cd inclavare-containers/rune

# install Go protobuf plugin for protobuf3
go get github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go@v1.3.5

# build and install rune
make
sudo make install

rune will be installed to /usr/local/sbin/rune on your system.

enclave runtime

The backend of rune is a component called enclave runtime, which is responsible for loading and running protected applications inside enclaves. The interface between rune and enclave runtime is Enclave Runtime PAL API, which allows invoking enclave runtime through well-defined functions. The software for confidential computing may benefit from this interface to interact with OCI runtime.

One typical class of enclave runtime implementations is based on library OSes. Currently, the default enclave runtime interacting with rune is Occlum, a memory-safe, multi-process library OS for Intel SGX.

In addition, you can write your own enclave runtime with any programming language and SDK (e.g, Intel SGX SDK) you prefer as long as it implements Enclave Runtime PAL API.

shim-rune

shim-rune resides in between containerd and rune, conducting enclave signing and management beyond the normal shim basis. shim-rune and rune can compose a basic enclave containerization stack for the cloud-native ecosystem.

shim-rune will be open source soon.

Using rune

Run Occlum

Please refer to this guide to run Occlum with rune.

Run Docker

Please refer to this guide to run Docker with rune.

Run skeleton

Skeleton is an example of enclave runtime, interfacing with Enclave Runtime PAL API for easy interfacing with rune. Skeleton sample code is helpful to write your own enclave runtime.

Please refer to this guide to run skeleton with rune.

For more information about Enclave Runtime PAL API, please refer to Enclave Runtime PAL API Specification.

finallyjustice / inclavare-containers