Confidentiality Enhancement: Revision Skylake Add new features SGX

The Intel Skylake processor comes at a large shipment, but now officially confirms the news of the revision.

Don't panic, it's not a quality issue, but Intel will add a new feature SGX (software guard Extensions, Software Protection Extension Directive) for the Skylake processor in a new batch at the end of October.

SGX was first introduced in 2013, the main function is to provide a trusted space on the computing platform (like "sandbox"), to protect the confidentiality and integrity of user-critical code and data.

Specifically, this approach is not to identify and isolate all malware on the platform, but to encapsulate the security of legitimate software in a enclave that protects it from malware, privileged or non-privileged software that cannot access enclave, which means Once the software and data are in enclave, even the operating system or the VMM (Hypervisor) cannot affect the code and data inside the enclave. The Enclave security boundary contains only the CPU and itself.

Intel says the affected Skylake processors are mainly concentrated in the mid-and high-end, including the boxed and i7\i5\e3-1200 V5 series.

In addition, the changes are only s-spec and mm numbers, other like stepping version (R0), CPUID (0x506e3), die size, packaging, packaging, etc. are unchanged, the BIOS does not need to be updated.

Confidentiality Enhancement: Revision Skylake Add new features SGX