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I'm sure you're already familiar, but for others, there is also AMD's SEV-SNP [0] and Intel's TDX [1] that solve similar problems. Azure has SEV-SNP VMs in prev

• exfalso 5y ago
  In terms of security these technologies are (mostly) strictly worse than SGX, and there hasn't been nearly enough security research done on them. Also, the physical attack vectors remain (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04575 https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04575). A small but interesting counterexample is x86 TSC: with SGX the MSR is modifiable by ring 0, with AMD SEV-SNP it is protected from the hypervisor. The real value of these newer technologies is not increased security, but rather increased usability. (Also, small sidenote: TDX relies on SGX.) I think the biggest contribution that cloud providers can bring to the table in the mid-term is mitigation of the physical attack vector. This would involve inserting themselves as a second root of trust in attestations (SEV has explicit support for this), which would mean that a real world attack would require collusion of multiple parties (pick 2 of Hardware vendor, Cloud provider, Software vendor).