A decade after Intel SGX’s public release, a rich ecosystem of shielding runtimes has emerged, but research on API and ABI sanitization attacks shows that their growing complexity introduces new vulnerabilities. What is still missing is a truly minimal and portable way to develop enclaves.

In this talk, we will introduce our recent work on "bare-sgx", a lightweight, fully customizable framework for building SGX enclaves directly on bare-metal Linux using only C and assembly. The initial code was forked from the Linux kernel's selftests framework and explicitly encouraged by prominent kernel developers. By interfacing directly with the upstream SGX driver, bare-sgx removes the complexity and overhead of existing SGX SDKs and library OSs. The result is extremely small enclaves, often just a few pages, tailored to a specific purpose and excluding all other unnecessary code and features. Therefore, bare-sgx provides a truly minimal trusted computing base while avoiding fragile dependencies that could hinder portability or long-term reproducibility.

Although still young, bare-sgx aims to provide a long-term stable foundation for minimal-trust enclave development, reproducible research artifacts, and rapid prototyping of SGX attacks and defenses.