I saw what I thought was a nice talk a couple of years ago at fosdem introducing the topic https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1...

Even when running on bare metal I think the concept of measurements and attestations that attempt to prove it hasn't been tampered with are valuable, unless perhaps you also have direct physical control (eg: it's in a server room in your own building)

Looking forward to public clouds maturing their support for Nvidia's confidential computing extensions as that seems like one of the bigger gaps remaining

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louwrentius 5 days ago | parent [-]

I don't believe in the validity of the idea of 'confidential computing' on a fundamental level.

Yes, there are degrees of risk and you can pretend that the risks of third-parties running hardware for you are so reduced / mitigated due to 'confidential computing' it's 'secure enough'.

I understand things can be a trade-off. Yet I still feel 'confidential computing' is an elaborate justification that decision makers can point to, to keep the status quo and even do more things in the cloud.

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mnahkies 4 days ago | parent [-]

I'm a relative layman in this area, but from my understanding, fundamentally there has to be some trust somewhere, and I think confidential computing aims to provide a way to both distribute that trust (split the responsibility between the hardware manufacturer and cloud provider, though I'm aware already sounds like a losing prop if cloud providers are also the hardware manufacturer) and provide a way to verify it's intact.

Ultimately it's harder to get multiple independent parties to collude than a single entity, and for many threat models that's enough.

Whether today's solutions are particularly good at delivering this, I don't know (slides linked in another comment suggest not so good), but I'm glad people are dedicating effort to trying to figure it out

	▲	trebligdivad 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you get it right (and damn you really need to ask your cloud provider to prove they have...) - you don't need to trust the cloud provider in this model at all. In reality most of the provided systems do trust the provider somewhere but only to the level of some key store or something in the back, not the people in the normal data centres.