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HSMs have been around for donkey's years. SGX is interesting because now you can run e.g. a whole database inside an enclave on commodity CPUs with competitive
by anonymousDan 8y ago
HSMs have been around for donkey's years. SGX is interesting because now you can run e.g. a whole database inside an enclave on commodity CPUs with competitive performance.
- mtgx 8y agoArm has already announced crypto-processors, which I assume aren't very expensive. Every chip maker could use one as an HSM now. https://developer.arm.com/products/system-ip/security-ip/cryptoisland-family https://developer.arm.com/products/system-ip/security-ip/cry... https://developer.arm.com/products/system-ip/security-ip/cryptocell-700-family https://developer.arm.com/products/system-ip/security-ip/cry...
- MaxBarraclough 8y agoSo the chip-maker would have their hardware protect the permanent secret key, and use ARM's coprocessor to do the cryptographic heavy-lifting? Sounds reasonable. Is that the first high-level crypto coprocessor then? I'm surprised it's taken this long.
- jchw 8y agoI always thought the purported advantage of SGX was being able to run important bits of code with ensured integrity, using attestation, even on an unsecure machine. If you ran a whole database in SGX or TrustZone, you just open yourself up to traditional security vulnerabilities alongside the usual side channel attacks you can do against them.
- anonymousDan 8y agoWell yes, but I AFAIK remote attestation for specialized security processors has been around for a while. You are of course right that you still have a large attack surface + side channels etc. But at least you can't just snoop on the RAM.