RAKIS: Secure Fast I/O Primitives Across Trust Boundaries on Intel SGX

RAKIS is a comprehensive system that securely enables SGX enclave programs to leverage fast IO Linux kernel primitives without modifying user applications. RAKIS achieves performance advantages without sacrificing TCB size or introducing deployment intricacies and demonstrates significant improvements in benchmark tests with a 4.6x increase in UDP network throughput compared to state-of-the-art SGX enclave LibOS Gramine. In addition, RAKIS was shown to achieve an average performance improvement of 2.8x compared to Gramine across four real-world programs: Memcached, Curl, Redis, and MCrypt.

RAKIS was published in EuroSys'25. Please read our paper for full details on RAKIS.

Building

Building Gramine

RAKIS is a fork of Gramine. So before starting with RAKIS, we suggest that you go on to Gramine to setup the SGX environment and make sure you are able to build and run example programs on gramine-sgx. Luckily, they have a rich documentation on how to setup everything you need.

System requirements

In addition to the system requirements of Gramine, RAKIS uses Linux kernel IO primitives that are only available on recent kernels: AF_XDP and io_uring. In fact, many aspects of both of those IO primitives are actively being developed and improved with each Linux kernel release, so the most recent Linux kernel is really recommended. However, RAKIS was developed and tested only on Linux kernel 6.2.

Hardware requirement

RAKIS does not enforce any hardware requirements. However, some NICs have better support for XDP feature, i.e. enabling zero-copy mode. With XDP, the Linux kernel will have an emulated mode for NICs that dont have support for XDP, in that case, however, performance may not be optimal.

Building RAKIS

Configure:

meson setup build-release/ --buildtype=release \
   -Ddirect=enabled -Dsgx=enabled -Drakis=enabled \
   --prefix=$HOME/.local/gramine

Build:

ninja -C build-release/ install

Environment setup

We will explain how we setup our environment for the experiments showcased on our RAKIS paper.

Network configuration

We employed one NIC that have two Ethernet interfaces (ens1f0 & ens1f1) which are wired in a loopback configuration. Next, in order to avoid any Linux kernel optimization on send/recv of packets within the same system, we placed one of the interfaces (ens1f1) in a separate network namespace:

# create new namespace
sudo ip netns add client_ns;

# move ens1f1 to client_ns namespace
sudo ip link set ens1f1 netns client_ns;
sudo ip netns exec client_ns ip addr add 10.50.0.2/24 dev ens1f1;
sudo ip netns exec client_ns ip link set dev ens1f1 up;
sudo ip netns exec client_ns ip link set dev lo up;

# set ip for ens1f0 in the same network for routing
sudo ip address add 10.50.0.1/24 dev ens1f0;

# test reachability
ping 10.50.0.2 -c3;
sudo ip netns exec client_ns ping 10.50.0.1 -c3;

XDP configuration

We use interface ens1f0 for loading and attaching XDP programs. Network packets arrive at the interfaces in many different queues. The number of queues can be checked using:

sudo ethtool -l ens1f0;

However, we will be attaching our XDP program to only a subset of those queues. This is a problem because packets intended for us may arrive to queues that we are not attached to, and so we miss them. This problem can be solved either by using a NIC that have hardware capabilities to send packets to specific queues based on packet data (i.e. UDP port) (See here). Or, to make things easier for us, we will just combine all queues of our interface into a small number of queues that we will attach to all of them:

sudo ethtool -L ens1f0 combined 1;

RAKIS configuration

RAKIS is easy to configure. The file iperf3.manifest.template has example configurations for RAKIS with explanation for each option. In addition, RAKIS needs the XDP program to be already loaded and will just receive the xsk socket fd from a unix socket. We created an XDP program that we used for all of our experimentation. To make things flexible, we keep this utility in a separate small program so that users can choose the behavior of the loaded XDP programs. Please check rakis-xdp-ctrl for more details.

Running

We use iperf3 as an example of how to run RAKIS. We start by navigating to CI-Examples/rakis-xdp-ctrl and run make. This will compile our xdp loader tool and the xdp ebpf program. We run the tool in the background with:

sudo ./rakis-xdp-def-ctrl -i ens1f0 -p /tmp/rakis-xdp-def-ctrl &

We can check that our XDP program is loaded with: ip a and reading the interface information:

.....
8: ens1f0: ..... xdp/id:1021 ......
    link/ether 40:a6:b7:40:37:f8 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
.....

Now we head over to iperf3 in CI-Examples/iperf3. To compile iperf3 and prepare everything:

make SGX=1

After compilation is done, we should find the iperf3 binary within the CI-Examples/iperf3 directory. To run the server within SGX we can simply do:

sudo $HOME/.local/gramine/bin/gramine-sgx ./iperf3 -s -p 57344 -4 -V -B 10.50.0.1 --forceflush

Note that you can configure your Linux user to avoid using sudo here. But lets move on. Now you should have iperf3 running on port 57344. Please make sure the port you choose is within the range of rakis. That range by default is >= 0xe000.

In a separate terminal, lets run iperf3 in the client_ns network namespace:

sudo ip netns exec client_ns ./iperf3 -c 10.50.0.1 -p 57344 -4 -V --get-server-output --udp-counters-64bit -B 10.50.0.2 --forceflush -O 3 -t 10 -u -b 25G -l 1460 -f m

I will leave the explanation of the iperf3 options used here for iperf3 --help but thats it with RAKIS!

Eurosys artifact reviewers

We organized our artifact walkthrough to facilitate ease of reproduction. The process guides reviewers to individual directories for each experiment detailed in our paper. Each directory contains a README.md file with a section titled "Eurosys Artifact Reviewers", which specifies the exact commands required to run the experiments. To streamline execution and ensure transparency, we also provide Makefiles with the eurosys-reproduce target. These Makefile targets simplify the process of running the experiments and clearly display the commands being executed.

SSH access

In accordance with Eurosys artifact evaluation committee guidelines for projects requiring Intel SGX, we are providing SSH access to our machine for reviewers. Please contact us via HotCRP to request access.

Environment setup

You do not need to set up the environment on our machine, as it has already been configured.

Start here!

Once you login to our machine, clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/sslab-gatech/RAKIS.git

and run (in the top-level directory):

make eurosys-reproduce

It will build and install RAKIS & Gramine in ~/.local. If the build process prompts for a password, please use the password provided. This is necessary to enable certain user capabilities for the RAKIS binary to load and attach XDP programs.

Our environment also has a XDP loader process running in the background which you can use directly. So there is no need to execute any of the steps in CI-Examples/rakis-xdp-ctrl.

Now, you are ready to start with the experiments. For each of the following workloads, please skip over to the "Eurosys artifact reviewers" section in the README.md file within for instructions. Do not execute the instructions before that as it might be already setup in our server. Artifact evaluation experiments:

Bibtex

@inproceedings{10.1145/3689031.3696090,
author = {Mansour Alharthi and Fan Sang and Dmitrii Kuvaiskii and Mona Vij and Taesoo Kim},
title = {RAKIS: Secure Fast I/O Primitives Across Trust Boundaries on Intel SGX},
booktitle = {Proceedings of Twentieth European Conference on Computer Systems},
year = {2025},
}