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That wasn't actually a fail, was it? Intel pivoted a few times to try and find market demand because it turned out that developers couldn't/wouldn't handle the

That wasn't actually a fail, was it? Intel pivoted a few times to try and find market demand because it turned out that developers couldn't/wouldn't handle the original more secure SGX design in which available RAM was limited but physical attacks were harder. Nobody wrote enclaves (well, except a few people like me), and instead people adopted AMD's SEV - which was far, far less secure, but it's a market for lemons. Very few people really understand this stuff. So Intel saw this and said OK, developers can't handle the enclave model and maybe don't care about physical attacks, they want remotely attestable cloud VMs instead. Unfortunately making memory secure against physical attacks, plentiful and fast simultaneously is an unsolved research problem. You can have two of three but not easily all of them. Intel's original design provided memory secure against physical attacks and fast enough, but not plentiful. Post-pivot they provided plentiful RAM but sacrificed security against physical attacks. The original SGX I wrote enclaves for were secure against physical attacks along with many others. It's a pity the computing industry proved unwilling to adopt it.

Retr0id 6mo ago
It's a not-fail in the sense that it's working as designed, but there is certainly a failure somewhere - perhaps on the branding/marketing level, since there are multiple products called "SGX" with substantially different security properties, and not everyone got the memo about the changes. If a product advertises using SGX to achieve some security property, I have no way of knowing which SGX they're talking about (and maybe they don't know, either). FWIW I am fairly sceptical of both ZKP and confidential computing. With CC it seems like an ongoing attacker/defender arms race, whereas my confidence in the more "boring", battle-tested ZKP constructions only grows with time. I think both can be used to improve the security of a system, but ideally as more of a defense-in-depth measure than as something load bearing.
- mike_hearn 6mo ago
  Agree that changing the threat model whilst keeping the same brand name is confusing.

Retr0id 6mo ago

It's a not-fail in the sense that it's working as designed, but there is certainly a failure somewhere - perhaps on the branding/marketing level, since there are multiple products called "SGX" with substantially different security properties, and not everyone got the memo about the changes. If a product advertises using SGX to achieve some security property, I have no way of knowing which SGX they're talking about (and maybe they don't know, either). FWIW I am fairly sceptical of both ZKP and confidential computing. With CC it seems like an ongoing attacker/defender arms race, whereas my confidence in the more "boring", battle-tested ZKP constructions only grows with time. I think both can be used to improve the security of a system, but ideally as more of a defense-in-depth measure than as something load bearing.

mike_hearn 6mo ago
Agree that changing the threat model whilst keeping the same brand name is confusing.