Intel SGX Enclave Support Added To GCC

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 17 March 2018 at 05:00 PM EDT. 7 Comments
GNU
The latest feature addition to the GCC compiler this week is support for Intel's new "ENCLV".

ENCLV is a new intrinsic that is part of the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The Enclave happens to be a trusted execution environment embedded into a process with isolated memory regions of code.data. Enclaves are protected areas of execution and the ENCLV instruction is needed to put application code into that special mode.

For those wishing to learn more about the Intel SGX Enclave functionality, there is this whitepaper (PDF) outlining it.

Developers have been working on the Intel SGX support with the necessary kernel bits, etc, while this ENCLV intrinsic is part of the compiler-side work on supporting the Software Guard Extensions. SGX is geared for Digital Rights Management, secure computing, remote computations, and more. SGX is supported since Skylake CPUs.

This addition will be part of the upcoming GCC 8 stable release.
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