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Confidential computing is not secure against a potential attacker who has physical access to the hardware. The CC security guarantees explicitly assume the atta
by erwald 3mo ago
Confidential computing is not secure against a potential attacker who has physical access to the hardware. The CC security guarantees explicitly assume the attacker has no physical access.
- traceroute66 3mo ago> is not secure against a potential attacker who has physical access to the hardware. Well, yes, its the oldest adage in computing that "physical access == game over". So I would argue it is more about reducing your risk to a more acceptable level. And in that respect I would say using services such as Tinfoil or Privatemode is an enormous step up from "trust me dude, we won't look at your data". Remotely verifiable attestation combined with independent audits of the company hosting is a large step up from a Zero Data Retention clause in your contract that you have no way of verifying is actually happening other than "trust me dude". Clearly I absolutely agree, having it on your own infrastructure is best for confidentiality. But even then, what about evil-maid attacks in the datacentre ? Unless you have your own datacentre, you're going to be in a shared colo facility ...
- erwald 3mo agoYeah, to be clear I'm pretty excited about confidential computing and startups building on it, like Tinfoil, for some use cases. I just wanted to point out it's far from adequate for some important threat models (e.g., securing model weights for data centers located abroad, I think). (It's also not super widely adopted in AI yet, but that seems to be changing, at least for inference workloads.)