6 ms·

Project Oak: Meaningful control of data in distributed systems

147 points by tiziano88 2y ago

spankalee 2y ago
The lede is a little buried in that README [1]: ## Sealed Computing A canonical use of Oak is to build privacy-preserving sealed computing applications. In a sealed computing application, a node (usually a client device) sends data to an enclave application (usually a server), which processes data without the service provider hosting the enclave application being able to see the inputs, outputs, or side effects of the computation. [1]: https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#sealed-computing https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#sealed... --- Seems like an attempt at a privacy-preserving alternative to running your whole phone OS image on a server?
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  But can it deliver ads?
  - nrabulinski 2y ago
    It’s a google project, that’s probably the first use case they considered
    - WaywardGeek 2y ago
      Another sealed computing use case that is public: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/security/ckv-whitepaper https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/security/ck... And this one: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/10/SecurityofPasskeysintheGooglePasswordManager.html https://security.googleblog.com/2022/10/SecurityofPasskeysin... I've been fortunate to be paid by Google to hide user data from Google since 2016. Not many companies would shell out anything for this sort of privacy feature. As for the Oak stack, they win the race. It is the only stack that currently provides full hardware attestation covering 100% of the code running in the enclave, and 100% of it is open-source. There are other good efforts, such as CoCo containers with their Key Broker, but so far they only cover the initial boot firmware, not the full set of software running inside the enclave. Kudos to the Oak team!
    - sulam 2y ago
      It’s really apples and oranges, Oak is about being able to execute code without side effects, even when it’s running in an environment you don’t provide. If it gets extended to the phone you can snark about ads, but really it would only be able to address whether any data associated with your viewing an ads escapes to a third party. So it would largely make ads be more like a billboard vs the way they work today. But that’s speculation, Oak isn’t trying to make the world safe from advertisers, it’s trying to make your data safe from being used in ways you didn’t permit, even when it’s being operated on in an environment you didn’t provide.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  Sounds like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    > When on-device computation with Apple devices such as iPhone and Mac is possible, the security and privacy advantages are clear: users control their own devices, researchers can inspect both hardware and software, runtime transparency is cryptographically assured through Secure Boot, and Apple retains no privileged access Waitasec - ZOOM AND ENHANCE! > users control their own devices I’ll believe that when Apple lets me downgrade my iOS version.
  - sulam 2y ago
    It both predates the Apple approach and is more thorough. I cannot inspect or ensure the software BoM of my image with Apple’s approach, I just have to trust them. With Oak you have trust down to the hardware.
- nepthar 2y ago
  Honestly, I think it will be used for the reverse (and unfortunately more evil) - Google wants to be able to control YOUR machine's compute environment for things like playing back of DRM'd content. They want a chain of trust that your browser cannot be modified to do things like block ads.
  - leoqa 2y ago
    From a service owner perspective, if I offer content and want to enforce strong identity from the user then this seems like a win. I may lose eyeballs but will gain higher confidence that my content is being consumed as intended. I'm fine with more controls in place, a safer internet is clearly a social win that would reduce life alerting fraud, scams etc. If power users want to go to their peer-to-peer cesspool then go for it.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      How does enforcing strong attestation from the user result in a safer internet or reduce life alerting frauds and scams? It's not users injecting that onto pages, it's the ad networks that operators choose to use.
    - nepthar 2y ago
      A safer internet does not necessarily follow from having this system in place. I'd like to point out that this is an opinion that you have which I and others disagree with. I also don't believe that content creators have any kind of legal or moral right to force the general public to "consume as intended". For instance, I've got a shelf in my office that's built with supports that are designed for plumbing. I have not consumed these pipes as intended.
  - tiziano88 2y ago
    Oak focuses on running workloads on server-side TEEs
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pluto_modadic 2y ago
I was curious if someone would build something that allows the DCAP datacenter attestation to be exposed to applications, e.g. "prove via intel that the SHA of the software running on the machine is XYZ"
- noja 2y ago
  Like Signal did for contact discovery? https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
- bobbiechen 2y ago
  >"prove via intel that the SHA of the software running on the machine is XYZ" This is exactly the purpose of MRENCLAVE in Intel SGX remote attestation quotes (and similar fields in other TEE platforms), and proving the software identity to remote clients is a common use case. Maybe I misunderstand - is that what you mean, or is there another use case you are looking for?
trallnag 2y ago
Nice, seems like a more cost-effective alternative to homomorphic encryption
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Attestation is to homomorphic encryption as storing things in a bank safe is to burying it out in the woods. There’s an entity providing you service and they’re trying their best to guarantee that they’re not going to decrypt your stuff but there’s usually some sort of collusion that will make it possible.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
blahgeek 2y ago
This seem to be Google's response to Apple private cloud compute [1]? [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- dboreham 2y ago
  Except the other way around.
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    Except that Apple actually uses this privacy stuff. Is Project Oak used by Android or Pixel?
    - tiziano88 2y ago
      https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10764 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10764 describes some of the current use cases already using Oak
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
topspin 2y ago
How does this relate/compare to AWS Nitro Enclaves? It looks like the same concept, except integrated into Intel and AMD CPUs.
- arianvanp 2y ago
  Nitro enclaves is a lot less ambitious than this. This is a full blown microkernel. Whilst nitro Enclave is a Linux kernel with just virtio drivers enabled + a small initrd containing your Linux application. The "Trusted compute base" of nitro enclaves is larger. Nitro enclaves also doesn't have all this high level infrastructure of composing microservices like this does I think (but somebody smarter might correct me) that with nitro enclaves you also need to trust Amazon. Whilst with this you need to trust AMD, but don't need to trust GCP Nice thing about nitro enclaves is that the Linux bits aren't tied to OCI. E.g. Monzo uses nix to build their enclave images https://github.com/monzo/aws-nitro-util https://github.com/monzo/aws-nitro-util
asterfield 2y ago
Maybe I’m just paranoid, but isn’t the (possibly unwritten) intent of this project to be able to flip the client and server around and run code in your browser and phone? I don’t understand their incentive to work on this unless they can use it to gatekeep “official” youtube clients (for example).
- dboreham 2y ago
  Incentive is that there is a small market segment that wants "actual privacy" and a concern that this segment could become very large at any moment due to publicity/awareness. Nobody wants to be caught with their pants down in that event.
xyst 2y ago
A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. edit: love that the community is not silo’d into a proprietary chat platform as well: > We welcome contributors! To join our community, we recommend joining the mailing list. - https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-involved https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#gettin... I really wish more open source projects used mailing lists. 1) decentralized means of communication 2) able to join these communities from any type of environment (ie, corporate hell hole) without much friction. With discord, slack (especially at fortune 500s). It usually involved a whole process of approvals to get the damn thing installed and punch a hole through the firewall to get access to the service. No, using a personal email and device for what I consider contributing from a work aspect (ie, submitting patch to OSS to solve specific problem with project) is not acceptable.
- jb1991 2y ago
  > A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. It’s security-focused technology. Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area.
  - filleokus 2y ago
    > Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area. Could you name some advantages? I would agree Rust has huge advantages compared to C/C++, and Rust also has a much bigger presence in the "security space". But I would say that's more because of Rust's lack of GC, smaller footprint which works in embedded systems etc. I guess you could say that Rust's type system being more expressive might eliminate certain classes of bugs, which have security implications. But "huge advantages"? (Honestly I'm not flame baiting, I'm genuinely curious if my worldview is wrong)
    - Ygg2 2y ago
      > But "huge advantages"? They don't call null/nil the billion dollar mistake for nothing.
moandcompany 2y ago
I think the authors should mention the background story for how this project originated at Google in Google Research (UK). Tried browsing through the Github project page and didn't see any obvious references, aside from the committers list. AFAIK, the first time I heard about "Project Oak" was about four or five years ago. This predates Apple's Private Cloud Compute.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some previous discussion: 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265625
tbrownaw 2y ago
So, something that can be used to run Tor relays that provably don't intentionally misbehave? Or hidden services that the hosting provider has no way to give other people access to?
7e 2y ago
How does this compare with https://github.com/confidential-containers https://github.com/confidential-containers?
calmbonsai 2y ago
Based on the headline, I thought this was a reference to Gosling's pre-Java language.
nanomonkey 2y ago
This reminds me of Spritely Goblins from the Spritely Institute, which has "vats" where you can run code in a distributed manner using object capabilities.
camgunz 2y ago
Super cool. I did some reading about Secure Enclaves with I was dreaming up ways to democratize compute; very cool to see a project like this making it a reality.
katsura 2y ago
At first I thought this is related to the Oak server: https://github.com/oakserver/oak https://github.com/oakserver/oak
- pavlov 2y ago
  Oak was also the original name of the language that became Java.

147 points by tiziano88 2y ago

The lede is a little buried in that README [1]: ## Sealed Computing A canonical use of Oak is to build privacy-preserving sealed computing applications. In a sealed computing application, a node (usually a client device) sends data to an enclave application (usually a server), which processes data without the service provider hosting the enclave application being able to see the inputs, outputs, or side effects of the computation. [1]: https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#sealed-computing https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#sealed... --- Seems like an attempt at a privacy-preserving alternative to running your whole phone OS image on a server?

warkdarrior 2y ago
But can it deliver ads?
- nrabulinski 2y ago
  It’s a google project, that’s probably the first use case they considered
  - WaywardGeek 2y ago
    Another sealed computing use case that is public: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/security/ckv-whitepaper https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/security/ck... And this one: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/10/SecurityofPasskeysintheGooglePasswordManager.html https://security.googleblog.com/2022/10/SecurityofPasskeysin... I've been fortunate to be paid by Google to hide user data from Google since 2016. Not many companies would shell out anything for this sort of privacy feature. As for the Oak stack, they win the race. It is the only stack that currently provides full hardware attestation covering 100% of the code running in the enclave, and 100% of it is open-source. There are other good efforts, such as CoCo containers with their Key Broker, but so far they only cover the initial boot firmware, not the full set of software running inside the enclave. Kudos to the Oak team!
  - sulam 2y ago
    It’s really apples and oranges, Oak is about being able to execute code without side effects, even when it’s running in an environment you don’t provide. If it gets extended to the phone you can snark about ads, but really it would only be able to address whether any data associated with your viewing an ads escapes to a third party. So it would largely make ads be more like a billboard vs the way they work today. But that’s speculation, Oak isn’t trying to make the world safe from advertisers, it’s trying to make your data safe from being used in ways you didn’t permit, even when it’s being operated on in an environment you didn’t provide.
JimDabell 2y ago
Sounds like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  > When on-device computation with Apple devices such as iPhone and Mac is possible, the security and privacy advantages are clear: users control their own devices, researchers can inspect both hardware and software, runtime transparency is cryptographically assured through Secure Boot, and Apple retains no privileged access Waitasec - ZOOM AND ENHANCE! > users control their own devices I’ll believe that when Apple lets me downgrade my iOS version.
- sulam 2y ago
  It both predates the Apple approach and is more thorough. I cannot inspect or ensure the software BoM of my image with Apple’s approach, I just have to trust them. With Oak you have trust down to the hardware.
nepthar 2y ago
Honestly, I think it will be used for the reverse (and unfortunately more evil) - Google wants to be able to control YOUR machine's compute environment for things like playing back of DRM'd content. They want a chain of trust that your browser cannot be modified to do things like block ads.
- leoqa 2y ago
  From a service owner perspective, if I offer content and want to enforce strong identity from the user then this seems like a win. I may lose eyeballs but will gain higher confidence that my content is being consumed as intended. I'm fine with more controls in place, a safer internet is clearly a social win that would reduce life alerting fraud, scams etc. If power users want to go to their peer-to-peer cesspool then go for it.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    How does enforcing strong attestation from the user result in a safer internet or reduce life alerting frauds and scams? It's not users injecting that onto pages, it's the ad networks that operators choose to use.
  - nepthar 2y ago
    A safer internet does not necessarily follow from having this system in place. I'd like to point out that this is an opinion that you have which I and others disagree with. I also don't believe that content creators have any kind of legal or moral right to force the general public to "consume as intended". For instance, I've got a shelf in my office that's built with supports that are designed for plumbing. I have not consumed these pipes as intended.
- tiziano88 2y ago
  Oak focuses on running workloads on server-side TEEs
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pluto_modadic 2y ago

I was curious if someone would build something that allows the DCAP datacenter attestation to be exposed to applications, e.g. "prove via intel that the SHA of the software running on the machine is XYZ"

noja 2y ago
Like Signal did for contact discovery? https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
bobbiechen 2y ago
>"prove via intel that the SHA of the software running on the machine is XYZ" This is exactly the purpose of MRENCLAVE in Intel SGX remote attestation quotes (and similar fields in other TEE platforms), and proving the software identity to remote clients is a common use case. Maybe I misunderstand - is that what you mean, or is there another use case you are looking for?

trallnag 2y ago

Nice, seems like a more cost-effective alternative to homomorphic encryption

saagarjha 2y ago
Attestation is to homomorphic encryption as storing things in a bank safe is to burying it out in the woods. There’s an entity providing you service and they’re trying their best to guarantee that they’re not going to decrypt your stuff but there’s usually some sort of collusion that will make it possible.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

blahgeek 2y ago

This seem to be Google's response to Apple private cloud compute [1]? [1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

dboreham 2y ago
Except the other way around.
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Except that Apple actually uses this privacy stuff. Is Project Oak used by Android or Pixel?
  - tiziano88 2y ago
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10764 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10764 describes some of the current use cases already using Oak
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

topspin 2y ago

How does this relate/compare to AWS Nitro Enclaves? It looks like the same concept, except integrated into Intel and AMD CPUs.

arianvanp 2y ago
Nitro enclaves is a lot less ambitious than this. This is a full blown microkernel. Whilst nitro Enclave is a Linux kernel with just virtio drivers enabled + a small initrd containing your Linux application. The "Trusted compute base" of nitro enclaves is larger. Nitro enclaves also doesn't have all this high level infrastructure of composing microservices like this does I think (but somebody smarter might correct me) that with nitro enclaves you also need to trust Amazon. Whilst with this you need to trust AMD, but don't need to trust GCP Nice thing about nitro enclaves is that the Linux bits aren't tied to OCI. E.g. Monzo uses nix to build their enclave images https://github.com/monzo/aws-nitro-util https://github.com/monzo/aws-nitro-util

asterfield 2y ago

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but isn’t the (possibly unwritten) intent of this project to be able to flip the client and server around and run code in your browser and phone? I don’t understand their incentive to work on this unless they can use it to gatekeep “official” youtube clients (for example).

dboreham 2y ago
Incentive is that there is a small market segment that wants "actual privacy" and a concern that this segment could become very large at any moment due to publicity/awareness. Nobody wants to be caught with their pants down in that event.

xyst 2y ago

A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. edit: love that the community is not silo’d into a proprietary chat platform as well: > We welcome contributors! To join our community, we recommend joining the mailing list. - https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-involved https://github.com/project-oak/oak?tab=readme-ov-file#gettin... I really wish more open source projects used mailing lists. 1) decentralized means of communication 2) able to join these communities from any type of environment (ie, corporate hell hole) without much friction. With discord, slack (especially at fortune 500s). It usually involved a whole process of approvals to get the damn thing installed and punch a hole through the firewall to get access to the service. No, using a personal email and device for what I consider contributing from a work aspect (ie, submitting patch to OSS to solve specific problem with project) is not acceptable.

jb1991 2y ago
> A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. It’s security-focused technology. Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area.
- filleokus 2y ago
  > Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area. Could you name some advantages? I would agree Rust has huge advantages compared to C/C++, and Rust also has a much bigger presence in the "security space". But I would say that's more because of Rust's lack of GC, smaller footprint which works in embedded systems etc. I guess you could say that Rust's type system being more expressive might eliminate certain classes of bugs, which have security implications. But "huge advantages"? (Honestly I'm not flame baiting, I'm genuinely curious if my worldview is wrong)
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    > But "huge advantages"? They don't call null/nil the billion dollar mistake for nothing.

moandcompany 2y ago

I think the authors should mention the background story for how this project originated at Google in Google Research (UK). Tried browsing through the Github project page and didn't see any obvious references, aside from the committers list. AFAIK, the first time I heard about "Project Oak" was about four or five years ago. This predates Apple's Private Cloud Compute.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some previous discussion: 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265625

tbrownaw 2y ago

So, something that can be used to run Tor relays that provably don't intentionally misbehave? Or hidden services that the hosting provider has no way to give other people access to?

7e 2y ago

How does this compare with https://github.com/confidential-containers https://github.com/confidential-containers?

calmbonsai 2y ago

Based on the headline, I thought this was a reference to Gosling's pre-Java language.

nanomonkey 2y ago

This reminds me of Spritely Goblins from the Spritely Institute, which has "vats" where you can run code in a distributed manner using object capabilities.

camgunz 2y ago

Super cool. I did some reading about Secure Enclaves with I was dreaming up ways to democratize compute; very cool to see a project like this making it a reality.

katsura 2y ago

At first I thought this is related to the Oak server: https://github.com/oakserver/oak https://github.com/oakserver/oak

pavlov 2y ago
Oak was also the original name of the language that became Java.