Scaling Databases through Trusted Hardware Proxies

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) allow asserting the integrity of previously untrusted third parties using novel hardware features. Unlike previous approaches to trusted computing, they have become readily available on most consumer devices sold today. This opens up the possibility for many novel applications, where not only the server, but also clients are equipped with trusted hardware. This work presents a mechanism to run trusted proxies on clients in order to offload large parts of the workload from a database server. We show that none of the integrity and confidentiality guarantees provided by the database are weakened as a result this mechanism. Evaluation shows that we can improve throughput by at least an order of magnitude, when the database server itself runs in a TEE. Further we can improve performance by a factor of two, even in the case where the server is not limited by a TEE.