This document describes all of the major current Veracruz components, and their purpose. If adding a new component, please make sure to update this document so that we can keep track of what everything does. We largely use Mexican States to name our components.
The trusted Veracruz runtime manages data and programs, once provisioned into the isolate, and executes the WASM binary on the secret inputs once a result is requested by a principal. Note that this code must be explicitly trusted by anybody aiming to use Veracruz. Its major components are:
- Baja: acts as the TLS endpoint inside the isolate, managing encrypted and intrgrity-protected communication sessions between the trusted Veracruz runtime and the outside world (see also: Jalisco).
- Execution Engine: is the WASM execution engine for Veracruz, and which actually
executes a program to completion (or failure!). The Execution Engine exposes a custom
ABI to the WASM binary, and abstracts over the different execution strategies
available for executing a program: at the moment the JIT strategy is only
available when using seL4 (or
freestanding-execution-engine
---see below) with interpretation as the only selectable execution strategy for TrustZone and SGX (we are currently working on changing this). - Colima: is a support library that manages the parsing and serialization of
protobuf
messages used in the various Veracruz wire protocols. - Mexico City: is a "command and control" module for the trusted Veracruz runtime which drives the other components.
- platform_services: provides an abstraction layer over important services that each isolate implementation provides. At the moment, this consists of a single service: random number generation.
- veracruz-utils: miscellaneous or common code that either does not fit elsewhere or is used by many different Veracruz components. The most important concept exposed by this library is the Global Policy, which describes the "topology" of a Veracruz computation.
Untrusted code needs to be used to interface between clients and the trusted Veracruz runtime. Components related to this untrusted interfacing are:
- Durango: is client software that is designed to interact with the Veracruz trusted runtime. Principals provisioning secrets into the isolate/challenging the authenticity of the isolate with remote attestation use this for all communication between them and the trusted runtime.
- Jalisco: is a TLS endpoint for use by clients, and is used to establish an encrypted and integrity-protected link between clients and the trusted runtime (see also: Baja).
- Sinaloa: is an untrusted "bridge"/server component executing on the delegate's machine, outside of the isolate, and which routes encrypted communication between the various principals and the isolate.
Veracruz uses a custom attestation service which sits between client code and the native attestation service of a particular enclave implementation (e.g. the Intel Attestation Service for Intel SGX). It contains the following components:
- psa-attestation: support code for the Arm PSA Attestation Protocol and Token. This is the attestation protocol that the Veracruz attestation service exposes to client code.
- Sonora: this is the root attestation isolate that is assumed to be present on the delegate's machine, and which challenges the authenticity of other isolates initialized on the machine using local attestation. This isolate must be authenticated using remote attestation, making use of the native attestation service for the isolation technology in use to protect Sonora (SGX only, for the time being).
- Tabasco: this is the attestation service proper, which maintains a database of registered keys and identities, and which can be contacted by clients to authenticate an isolate enrolled in the service.
The Veracruz Software Development Kit (SDK) is intended to ease writing programs for the Veracruz platform. It contains the following components:
- Examples: various example multi-party computations of interest, written in
Rust, have been developed as examples (they are also used in our various
integration tests: see the test plan document for more details). The examples
include those that do not build against the Rust standard library (i.e. are
no_std
) and those which use both the standard library and off-the-shelf Rust libraries for e.g. machine learning. Examples use Xargo to build a custom set of core Rust libraries before building the examples. - Freestanding Execution Engine: this is a version of the WASM execution
engine (see above) that has been wrapped in a command line interface, and is
intended to allow offline testing of Veracruz programs outside of an enclave.
See
./freestanding-execution-engine --help
for more information on invoking the offline execution engine, and the different configuration options available. - The Veracruz support library (
libveracruz
): this is a Rust support library for writing Veracruz programs. It abstracts the Veracruz ABI, exposing a higher-level series of functions for grabbing inputs to the computation, writing outputs, signalling failures, and so on and so forth. - The Veracruz runtime library (
veracruz_rt
): this is a thin Rust runtime library for working withno_std
builds with Veracruz. It sets up a global allocator (wee_alloc
) and helps with program teardown. - A fork of Rust's
getrandom
andrand
crates: these crates for sampling random numbers, and working with distributions of random numbers, have been ported to work with the Veracruz ABI's facilities for generating random data, as exposed bylibveracruz
. - A custom build target descriptor: Veracruz programs written in Rust are
compiled against the
wasm32-arm-veracruz
build target. This is a derivative of thewasm32-unknown-unknown
build target, and makes the forking of existing Rust libraries (e.g.getrandom
andrand
above) easier, as thewasm32-unknown-unknown
target is often interpreted as implying the WASI ABI in existing Rust code. - Tlaxcala: this is an ABI-validator for Veracruz binaries, which takes a binary as input and certifies that it only assumes the presence of WASM host functions that are exposed by the Veracruz ABI.