Requirements

For using Intel SGX, the following requirements has to be fullfilled.

📟 Compatible hardware

Be sure that you are using an Intel Cpu, which is compatible and offering the SGX functionality. The SGX Platform was introduced by the Skylake Microarchticture. The according processors are prefixed with a 6 or later. For example i7-6700. Additionally you can validate the SGX compatibility on the Intel Ark pages.

• Example: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/de/de/ark/products/88196/intel-core-i7-6700-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-00-ghz.html

✔️ Activated Intel SGX

Notice: Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) has to be enabled in BIOS settings. There you can choose between following states: disabled, enabled and software controlled. One of the last two is valid.

BIOS settings vary widely depending on the manufacturer. The following link contains concrete instructions for HP servers, but can be transferred to other devices.

• https://techlibrary.hpe.com/docs/iss/proliant_uefi/UEFI_Edgeline_103117/GUID-5B0A4E24-26B7-46CC-8A12-5C403A14B466.html

✔️ Supported Operating System

For using Intel SGX on linux it is highly recommended to use an offically supported OS. You can see a full list on the following page:

• https://01.org/intel-software-guard-extensions/downloads

At the time of writing this article Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and Fedora are supported. For our tutorials, we will use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS because it is one of the most used operating systems.