A Trusted Message Bus Built on Top of D-Bus
Newton C. Will, Tiago Heinrich, Amanda B. Viescinski, Carlos Maziero · 2020
A wide range of applications use Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanisms to communicate between each other or between their components running in different processes. A well-known IPC mechanism in UNIX-like systems is D-Bus, which allows processes to communicate by receiving and routing messages. Despite being widely used, such system lacks mechanisms to provide end-to-end data confidentiality. In this paper we propose the use of Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to provide a trusted communication channel between local applications over the D-Bus message bus system. We obtained stronger security guarantees in message confidentiality and integrity while keeping a small Trusted Computing Base (TCB) and compatibility with the reference D-Bus system.