Announcing Apache Teaclave (incubating) 0.4.0

April 18, 2022 · Mingshen Sun

On behalf of the Teaclave community, I am happy to announce the fourth Apache Incubator release of Teaclave, 0.4.0. Teaclave is a universal secure computing platform, making computation on privacy-sensitive data safe and simple. Apache Teaclave (including the FaaS platform, SGX SDK, and TrustZone SDK) is being used and contributed by developers from many organizations and other open source projects. Please see the powered by page to learn more.

In this release, we mainly focus on better user management, task management, performance improvement and stability.

# Highlights

In this release, we introduce a role-based access control for user management. Specifically, we define roles like admin, function owner, data owner, data owner manager, etc. Additionally, we also add APIs to support user management functionalities. In addition, we also implement a feature to cancel a running task to kill a long-run function which is no longer needed. Besides these two new features, we also made a lot of underlying changes to improve the performance of RPC and stability of the secure database.

To learn more, here is a list of notable changes in Teaclave version 0.4.0.

Features

  • Add the DisableFunction interface (#620)
  • Better user management interfaces: add the UserUpdate, UserChangePassword, ResetUserPassword, DeleteUser, and ListUsers interfaces
  • Support optional input/output files (#603)
  • Start Teaclave docker services with auto-detection mechanism (#559)
  • Add watchdog functionality to monitor service status (#600)
  • Support cancel a task
  • Support intermediate cert in DCAP attestation cert

Enhancements

  • Better error handling in Python client SDK (#632)
  • Refactor services error types and messages, make them readable to end users
  • Optimize RPC memory footprint of serde (#577)
  • Support selectively including executors (#574)
  • Support AES-GCM output files (#629)
  • Add port probe for service launching
  • Update WAMR version to WAMR-01-18-2022 (#616)
  • Move execution context into a separate crate (#598)
  • Support Ubuntu 20.04 docker image and add corresponding CI pipelines
  • Persistent MockDB in test mode (#580)

Bug Fixes

  • Better task state error and fix cancel error issue in the example (#637)
  • Fix privilege issues in the GetFunction and ListFunctions interfaces (#636)
  • Better building system: fix packages rebuild every time, avoid issues in parallel make (#589, #596)
  • Fix the issue of generating code coverage of tests (#627)
  • Fix LevelDB assertion issue: leveldb lru bug, using disk db for unit test (#583)

Docs

# Download

Teaclave 0.4.0 can be downloaded at the download page. Note that it is essential to verify the integrity of the downloaded file using the PGP signature (the .asc file) or a hash (the .sha256 file).

# Documentation

If it is the first time to try Teaclave, we provide a simple but clear tutorial to guide you getting stated with Teaclave by invoking your first function in Teaclave.

Basically, you can build the Teaclave platform using docker with these commands:

$ tar zxvf apache-teaclave-0.4.0-incubating.tar.gz && cd \
  apache-teaclave-0.4.0-incubating
$ # Instructions to verify the source tar: https://teaclave.apache.org/download/#verify-the-integrity-of-the-files

$ docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/teaclave -w /teaclave \
  -it teaclave/teaclave-build-ubuntu-1804-sgx-2.14:latest \
   bash -c ". /root/.cargo/env && \
     . /opt/sgxsdk/environment && \
     mkdir -p build && cd build && \
     cmake -DTEST_MODE=ON -DSGX_SIM_MODE=ON -DGIT_SUBMODULE=OFF .. && \
     make"

Launch all services with docker-compose using simulation mode:

$ (cd docker && docker-compose -f docker-compose-ubuntu-1804-sgx-sim-mode.yml up --build)

And invoke function with a Python client:

$ cd examples/python
$ PYTHONPATH=../../sdk/python python3 builtin_echo.py 'Hello, Teaclave!'
[+] registering user
[+] login
[+] registering function
[+] creating task
[+] approving task
[+] invoking task
[+] getting result
[+] done
[+] function return:  b'Hello, Teaclave!'

If you want to understand the internals of Teaclave, we provide several documents about the design of Teaclave. Also, we extensively document our codebase in each sub directories. At last, API references are automatically generated and uploaded to our homepage.

# Community

Apache Teaclave (incubating) is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. Copyright © 2020 The Apache Software Foundation. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Apache Teaclave, Apache, the Apache feather, and the Apache Teaclave project logo are either trademarks or registered trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation.