Sancus is an ongoing research project, being used both within DistriNet as well as by independent researchers. This page aims to give a comprehensive overview of academic publications on Sancus-based architectures and applications. Feel free to open a pull request on GitHub us if you know of other relevant research results to be included here.

The core Sancus security architecture was first presented at the 2013 USENIX security symposium. More recent developments are described in the Sancus 2.0 ACM TOPS journal paper, and in Job Noorman's PhD dissertation linked below. Furthermore, a higher-level description of Sancus 1.0 is provided by two survey publications on the Protected Module Architecture research field.

The following papers propose extensions to the Sancus hardware and compiler infrastructure. Either to protect the confidentiality of security-critical code, to preserve real-time deadlines on a partially compromised embedded platform, or to provide authentic execution guarantees for distributed event-driven applications.

Sancus has been leveraged to study subtle side-channel vulnerabilities that may undermine enclave protection guarantees. Particularly, an innovative timing side channel has been revealed when implementing secure interrupts on Sancus-like processors, leading to compiler-based defenses and hardware extensions to provably rule out this attack surface.

Ongoing work leverages Sancus's lightweight isolation and authentication primitives to establish trust in distributed embedded application scenarios. These range from addressing specific requirements, such as securely multiplexing shared platform resources among distrusting clients, or establishing the integrity of an untrusted host operating system, to extended case studies in the context of emerging smart electricity meters or automotive control networks.

Sancus has been used as the development platform for several master theses and other student projects.

2025. Timing vulnerabilities were identified in the Sancus cryptographic module and software libraries of related works. Mitigations were suggested in software and a fix to the hardware module has been proposed, evaluated, and integrated in the upstream repository.

2024. The automated vulnerability discovery tool 'Pandora' has been successfully ported from the high-end Intel SGX architecture to the low-end Sancus architecture. This adaptation enables automated discovery of control flow and pointer vulnerabilities within Sancus enclaves.

2022. The features of Sancus were compared with those offered by Intellectual Property Encapsulation (IPE), a security feature found on some commercial Texas Instruments microcontrollers.

2021. A Sancus compiler extension was developed that automatically balances conditional branches to protect against advanced side-channel adversaries exploiting fine-grained enclave memory-access patterns through Direct Memory Access (DMA) contention.

2020. Two theses leveraged Sancus as a base platform to further extend uses cases for authentic execution and controller-area network authentication. Another thesis, furthermore, explored a new type of side-channel attack on Sancus enclaves, exploiting memory contention from untrusted DMA devices.

2019. An enclave-aware DMA controller was developed to maintain Sancus's security properties in the presence of untrusted peripheral DMA devices. Another thesis developed an attack framework for single-stepping Sancus enclaves and investigated side-channel leakage in compiler-generated code.

2018. One thesis redesigned the Sancus compiler infrastructure, and used Sancus as the target platform for a unified secure compilation framework. Another project investigated secure communication channel establishment for distributed enclave applications with Sancus and Intel SGX.

2017. A trusted kernel-like software module has been developed to investigate hardware/software design trade-offs for cryptographic primitives. Another student project looked into providing responsiveness for the secure world formed by Sancus modules loaded on the same device.

2016. Sancus was used as the target platform for an automated reactive programming code generation framework.

2015. One thesis explored the feasibility of supplementing Sancus's hardware-enforced security guarantees with availability and access control guarantees for shared system resources. Another project leveraged Sancus to to establish secure I/O paths for applications running on higher-end Protected Module Architectures.

Sancus has recently been featured in a number of technology news website articles and at the 2018 Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM'18). Specifically, in the context of ongoing research that applies Sancus-based techniques to secure automotive control networks.