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“Confidential Computing” is an up-and-coming model in which a user (e.g. cloud customer) trusts a hardware vendor (e.g. Intel, AMD, nVidia), and that vendor has
by amluto 4y ago
“Confidential Computing” is an up-and-coming model in which a user (e.g. cloud customer) trusts a hardware vendor (e.g. Intel, AMD, nVidia), and that vendor has a mechanism by which systems with their hardware can run user code and attest, remotely, to the user that the code has not been tampered with and that the system’s owner (e.g. Amazon) is not exfiltrating user data.
This could be used for DRM or nefarious purposes, but that’s not the point.
Obviously this is no more secure than the underlying hardware. All the attacks against SGX, for example, will still apply unless they are fixed.
- fulafel 4y agoThis kind of thing has a history, eg this was on top of the TPM platform: https://web.archive.org/web/20060822043633/http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Wenbo_Mao/research/tcgridsec.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060822043633/http://www.hpl.hp... I wonder what's different this time.
- bpye 4y agoConfidential computing lets you reduce your TCB to the software running in your guest, be that a full OS like Linux or maybe some unikernel type thing, and the hardware itself. The intent is that a malicious host could not read or modify guest state, though of course they could simply refuse to schedule it.