Apple has done a good job on the implementation and documentation for their confidential computing (https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...) but of course it’s Apple only. There’s a few folks working on a non-Apple version of this, eg https://confident.security/ and others (disclaimer that I helped work on a very early version of this.
Read the Apple docs - they are very well written and accessible for the average HN reader.
le-mark · 2h ago
Timely considering the current (yet another) chip act. Presumably government mandated surveillance silicon would also require confidential compute capability.
Funny, some people never consider burning goodwill with populations directly open a competitive advantage for competitors. =3
matthewfcarlson · 1h ago
Years ago, I saw a demo for a confidential gaming VM with the idea that games could ship with a whole VM instead of an anti cheat engine. Most of the tech was around doing it performantly. I wonder why it was never productized.
tomrod · 5m ago
I'd imagine cost is a big factor. You have to contend with a lot of bad drivers on gpus, right? (This isn't my arena, just speculating here).
Bender · 1h ago
Maybe this will check a box in some OpenStack cluster but it wont work for me personally. Anything sensitive I use physical servers. Once I am on a VM of a physical server that is not mine then my data is their data. It is just turtles all the way down and there will always be a way to obtain data. Whats more this is required for lawful intercept and authorities expect providers today to be able to live copy/clone a VM. There will always be a back door and when authorities can access the back door, so can the providers and malicious actors. Even more unpopular is that to me encryption is just mathematical obfuscation a.k.a. magic math and the devil is in the implementation details remember WEP and DVD encryption? Just like cell phones there will always be some simple "debugging" toggle function that can bypass it.
Joel_Mckay · 41m ago
Unfortunately, if someone really wants into modern equipment it is rather trivial. As modern clouds often just used cost-optimized consumer grade CPUs/GPUs with sometimes minor conveniences like more ECC RAM, and backplane management options.
In many ways, incident detection and automated-recovery is more important than casting your servers in concrete.
Emulated VM can create read-only signed backing images, and thus may revert/monitor states. RancherVM is actually pretty useful when you dig into the architecture.
Best policy is to waste as much time and money of the irrational, and interleave tantalizing payloads of costly project failures. Adversaries eventually realize the lame prize is just not worth the effort, or steal things that ultimately will cost them later. =3
riedel · 1h ago
Confidential computing is the straw for many people to overcome GDPR headaches in Europe. I know particularly medical researchers that hope that they get access to scalable infrastructure this way, because they can tick it as the only additional TOM on the processor side. As mentioned in the comments of OP though it is more a promise than a reality at the moment with very little actual benefit in term of reducing relevant attack vectors.
louwrentius · 54m ago
I find the article a difficult read for someone not versed in “confidential computing”. It felt written for insiders and/or people smarter than me.
However, I feel that “confidential computing” is some kind of story to justify something that’s not possible: keep data ‘secure’ while running code on hardware maintained by others.
Any kind of encryption means that there is a secret somewhere and if you have control over the stack below the VM (hypervisor/hardware) you’ll be able to read that secret and defeat the encryption.
Maybe I’m missing something, though I believe that if the data is critical enough, it’s required to have 100% control over the hardware.
Now go buy an Oxide rack (no I didn’t invest in them)
crote · 10m ago
The unique selling point here is that you don't need to trust the hypervisor or operator, as the separation and per-VM encryption is managed by the CPU itself.
The CPU itself can attest that it is running your code and that your dedicated slice of memory is encrypted using a key inaccessible to the hypervisor. Provided you still trust AMD/Intel to not put backdoors into their hardware, this allows you to run your code while the physical machine is in possession of a less-trusted party.
It's of course still not going to be enough for the truly paranoid, but I think it provides a neat solution for companies with security needs which can't be met via regular cloud hosting.
Read the Apple docs - they are very well written and accessible for the average HN reader.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/geotech-cues/how-the-c...
In many ways, incident detection and automated-recovery is more important than casting your servers in concrete.
Emulated VM can create read-only signed backing images, and thus may revert/monitor states. RancherVM is actually pretty useful when you dig into the architecture.
Best policy is to waste as much time and money of the irrational, and interleave tantalizing payloads of costly project failures. Adversaries eventually realize the lame prize is just not worth the effort, or steal things that ultimately will cost them later. =3
However, I feel that “confidential computing” is some kind of story to justify something that’s not possible: keep data ‘secure’ while running code on hardware maintained by others.
Any kind of encryption means that there is a secret somewhere and if you have control over the stack below the VM (hypervisor/hardware) you’ll be able to read that secret and defeat the encryption.
Maybe I’m missing something, though I believe that if the data is critical enough, it’s required to have 100% control over the hardware.
Now go buy an Oxide rack (no I didn’t invest in them)
The CPU itself can attest that it is running your code and that your dedicated slice of memory is encrypted using a key inaccessible to the hypervisor. Provided you still trust AMD/Intel to not put backdoors into their hardware, this allows you to run your code while the physical machine is in possession of a less-trusted party.
It's of course still not going to be enough for the truly paranoid, but I think it provides a neat solution for companies with security needs which can't be met via regular cloud hosting.