Installation Guide

This page gives instructions on how to build and install Secure XGBoost from scratch. Secure XGBoost has been tested only on Ubuntu 18.04, but it should also work with Ubuntu 16.04. It consists of three steps:

1. First install the Open Enclave SDK
2. Next install the Secure XGBoost dependencies
3. Then build Secure XGBoost from source.

Note

Use of Git submodules

XGBoost uses Git submodules to manage dependencies. So when you clone the repo, remember to specify --recursive option:

git clone -b hackathon --recursive https://github.com/mc2-project/mc2-xgboost.git

Please refer to the Troubleshooting section first if you have any problem during installation. If the instructions do not work for you, please feel free to open an issue on GitHub.

Contents

• Installing the Open Enclave SDK
• Installing Secure XGBoost Dependencies
• Building Secure XGBoost
  • Building the Targets
  • Python Package Installation
• Troubleshooting

Installing the Open Enclave SDK

1. The requirements are:

   • Open Enclave version 0.8.1
   • Intel SGX DCAP Driver version 1.21

   Follow the instructions here to install the Intel SGX DCAP driver, and the Open Enclave packages and dependencies.

   Alternatively, you may also acquire a VM with the required features pre-installed from Azure Confidential Compute; in this case, however, you may need to manually upgrade the SDK installed in the VM to version 0.8.1, and the DCAP driver to version 1.21:

   Confirm that Open Enclave is version 0.8.1:

   sudo apt list open-enclave
   

   Confirm that the Intel SGX DCAP Driver is version 1.21:

   modinfo intel_sgx
   

   If not, follow these instructions to update.

2. Configure environment variables for Open Enclave SDK for Linux:

   source /opt/openenclave/share/openenclave/openenclaverc
   

   Consider adding this line to your ~/.bashrc to make the environment variables persist across sessions.

Installing Secure XGBoost Dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y libmbedtls-dev python3-pip
pip3 install numpy pandas sklearn numproto grpcio grpcio-tools kubernetes

Install cmake >= v3.11. E.g., the following commands install cmake v3.15.6.

wget https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.15.6/cmake-3.15.6-Linux-x86_64.sh
sudo bash cmake-3.15.6-Linux-x86_64.sh --skip-license --prefix=/usr/local

Building Secure XGBoost

Our goal is to build the shared library, along with the enclave:

• On Linux the target library is libxgboost.so
• The target enclave is xgboost_enclave.signed

The minimal building requirement is

• A recent C++ compiler supporting C++11 (g++-4.8 or higher)
• CMake 3.11 or higher

Building the Targets

1. Clone the repository recursively, and check out the required branch:

   git clone -b hackathon --recursive https://github.com/mc2-project/mc2-xgboost.git
   

2. Configure the enclave parameters in the file enclave/xgboost.conf, including the amount of virtual memory available to the enclave. More details on these parameters can be found here.

3. On Ubuntu, build the Secure XGBoost targets by running CMake:

   cd mc2-xgboost
   mkdir -p build
   
   pushd build
   cmake ..
   make -j4
   popd
   

Python Package Installation

The Python package is located at python-package/.

1. Install system-wide, which requires root permission:

cd python-package; sudo python3 setup.py install

Note

Re-compiling Secure XGBoost

If you recompiled Secure XGBoost, then you need to reinstall it again to make the new library take effect.

2. Set the environment variable PYTHONPATH to tell Python where to find the RPC library. For example, assume we cloned secure-xgboost on the home directory ~. then we can added the following line in ~/.bashrc.

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/mc2-xgboost/rpc

Troubleshooting

1. Compile failed after git pull

   Please first update the submodules, clean all and recompile:

   git submodule update && make clean_all && make -j4
   

2. Makefile: dmlc-core/make/dmlc.mk: No such file or directory

   We need to recursively clone the submodule:

   git submodule init
   git submodule update
   

   Alternatively, do another clone

   git clone -b hackathon --recursive https://github.com/mc2-project/mc2-xgboost.git