This Go tool kit makes it possible to run your application inside an AWS Nitro Enclave. Let's assume that you built a Web service in Rust. You can now use nitriding to move your Rust code into a secure enclave, making it possible for your users to remotely verify that you are in fact running the code that you claim to run. Nitriding provides the following features:
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Automatically obtains an HTTPS certificate (either self-signed or via Let's Encrypt) for clients to securely connect to your enclave over the Internet. Nitriding can act as a TLS-terminating reverse HTTP proxy for your application, so your application does not have to deal with obtaining certificates.
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Automatically exposes an HTTPS endpoint for remote attestation. After having audited your enclave's source code, your users can conveniently verify the enclave's image by using a tool like verify-enclave and running:
make verify CODE=/path/to/code/ ENCLAVE=https://enclave.com/enclave/attestation -
Are you building an application that uses a protocol other than HTTP? If so, nitriding makes it possible to register a hash over your application's public key material which is subsequently included in the attestation document. This allows your users to verify that their connection is securely terminated inside the enclave, regardless of the protocol that you are using.
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Provides an API to scale enclave applications horizontally while synchronizing state between enclaves.
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AWS Nitro Enclaves only provide a highly constrained VSOCK channel between the enclave and its host. Nitriding creates TAP interface inside the enclave, allowing your application to transparently access the Internet without having to worry about VSOCK, port forwarding, or tunneling.
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Automatically initializes the enclave's entropy pool using the Nitro hypervisor.
To learn more about nitriding's trust assumptions, architecture, and build system, take a look at our research paper.
Usage
To use nitriding, the following steps are necessary:
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Make sure that your enclave application supports reproducible builds; otherwise, users won't be able to verify your enclave image.
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Set up this proxy application on the EC2 host.
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Bundle your application and nitriding together in a Dockerfile. The nitriding stand-alone executable must be invoked first, followed by your application. To build the nitriding executable, run
make cmd/nitriding. (Then, run./cmd/nitriding -helpto see a list of command line options.) For reproducible Docker images, we recommend kaniko and ko (for Go applications only). -
Once your application is done bootstrapping, it must let nitriding know, so it can start the Internet-facing Web server that handles remote attestation and other tasks. To do so, the application must issue an HTTP GET request to
http://127.0.0.1:8080/enclave/ready. The handler ignores URL parameters and responds with a status code 200 if the request succeeded. Note that the port in this example, 8080, is controlled by nitriding's-intportcommand line flag.
Take a look at this example application to learn how nitriding works in practice.
Development
To test and lint the code, run:
make