Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide applications – notably executing in third-party infrastructures like the cloud – with an encrypted and isolated execution space, decoupling programs and their data from other resident applications and privileged software (e.g., operating system and hypervisor). This confinement of trust to hardware significantly reduces the attack surface. However, distributed cloud applications deployed in TEE often require frequent communication across worker nodes within a cluster. Ensuring the confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of inter-TEE data exchanges necessitates secure communication channels, typically enforced through encryption that introduces I/O throughput bottlenecks. In this paper, we demonstrate that software-based encryption-relying solely on central processing unit (CPU) computation-fails to keep pace with the high-throughput interconnects between TEE while consuming substantial CPU resources. To address this inefficiency, we propose a parallelized channel encryption hardware within the existing memory encryption engine (MEE). Initial experiments show that our approach has the potential to reduce communication channel encryption overhead to just a few CPU cycles resulting in orders of magnitude speedup over conventional software-based approaches.
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