Authors: Adrian Lutsch, Muhammad El-Hindi, Zsolt Istvan, Carsten Binnig

Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are widely adopted due to their flexibility and scalability, but recent incidents have shown that trusting cloud providers entirely for data security is risky. Traditional security models, which assume a trusted provider, are no longer sufficient.

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX, offer a promising solution by enabling secure computation without relying on the cloud provider. While earlier TEEs suffered from significant performance limitations, recent research indicates that their support for database workloads has improved substantially.

This paper explores how modern TEEs can be integrated into cloud DBMSs to enhance security while maintaining high performance. It reviews recent performance results of Intel SGX for DBMS workloads and outlines key research challenges that must be addressed to minimize the performance overhead of using TEEs for secure data processing.

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