Build and Run Your First Enclave

This guide will walk you through booting an EC2 machine, configuring it, then building and running your first enclave with Enclaver.

Boot the Machine

Only certain EC2 instance types can run Nitro Enclaves. Since dedicated CPUs are carved off for the enclave, the larger x86 types with 4+ vCPUs are ok, with c6a.xlarge being the cheapest. Your machines must be booted with the Nitro Enclave option enabled, which is found under the “Advanced details” > “Nitro Enclave”.

See the Deploying on AWS for more details and an example CloudFormation template.

Configure Instance

First, SSH to your EC2 machine:

$ ssh ec2-user@<ip address>

Install the Nitro Enclave packages:

$ sudo yum install --assumeyes aws-nitro-enclaves-cli aws-nitro-enclaves-cli-devel git

Configure the resources to dedicate to your enclaves:

$ sudo sed --in-place 's/memory_mib: 512/memory_mib: 3072/g' /etc/nitro_enclaves/allocator.yaml
$ sudo systemctl enable --now nitro-enclaves-allocator.service
$ sudo systemctl enable --now docker

Download the latest Enclaver binary:

$ curl --silent --location $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/edgebitio/enclaver/releases/latest | jq --raw-output ".assets[] | select(.name|match(\"^enclaver-linux-$(uname -m)-(.*)tar.gz$\")) | .browser_download_url") --output enclaver.tar.gz
$ tar --extract --verbose --file enclaver.tar.gz
$ sudo install enclaver-linux-$(uname -m)-v*/enclaver /usr/bin

Build the App

Clone Enclaver, which contains the example app code:

$ git clone https://github.com/edgebitio/enclaver

Enclaver uses a source “app” container image and transforms that image into an enclave image. Build the source app:

$ cd enclaver/example
$ sudo docker build --tag app .

This app echos a string back to you with each HTTP request:

$ sudo docker run --rm --detach --name app --publish 8000:8000 app
$ curl localhost:8000
Hello World!
$ sudo docker stop app

Build the Enclave Image

Enclaver builds enclave images based on a configuration file, which specifies the container that holds the app code, the network policy details.

Here’s the enclaver.yaml for the example app:

version: v1
name: "example"
target: "enclave:latest"
sources:
  app: "app:latest"
defaults:
  memory_mb: 1000
ingress:
  - listen_port: 8000

Build our enclave image:

$ sudo enclaver build --file enclaver.yaml

Run the Enclave

Run your enclave image by referencing it by it’s given target name:

$ sudo enclaver run --publish 8000:8000 enclave:latest

Open a new shell and send a request to the service:

$ curl localhost:8000
Hello World!

In your first shell you should see that the enclave received the request:

 INFO  enclave         > Example app listening on port 8000
 INFO  enclave         > Request received!

Boom! You’ve started your first secure enclave!

To clean up, you can ^C the enclaver run and it will shut down.

Next Steps

This example walked through running an simple application in an enclave. Next, experiement with running a specific microservice or a security-centric function within an enclave.

Check out the example Python app that talks to KMS.

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