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Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

edc.intel.com

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Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#71

Post by exfalso »

bpye wrote: post #12
kibwen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On consumer CPUs DRM may have been the only use case, and indeed good riddance. But on the server side it's possible for tenants to use these hardware features to run workloads that the hosts verifiably cannot modify or inspect. In other words, this lets you use AWS/GCP/Azure etc. while keeping both your data and your code competely opaque to Amazon/Google/Microsoft etc. Disclaimer: my job is to write the software th…

I'm sure you're already familiar, but for others, there is also AMD's SEV-SNP [0] and Intel's TDX [1] that solve similar problems. Azure has SEV-SNP VMs in preview [2] - full disclosure, I work at Microsoft and was involved in this :) [0] - https://www.amd.com/system/files/TechDocs/SEV-SNP-strengthen... [1] - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... [2] - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/…

In terms of security these technologies are (mostly) strictly worse than SGX, and there hasn't been nearly enough security research done on them. Also, the physical attack vectors remain (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04575). A small but interesting counterexample is x86 TSC: with SGX the MSR is modifiable by ring 0, with AMD SEV-SNP it is protected from the hypervisor. The real value of these newer technologies is not increased security, but rather increased usability. (Also, small sidenote: TDX relies on SGX.)

I think the biggest contribution that cloud providers can bring to the table in the mid-term is mitigation of the physical attack vector. This would involve inserting themselves as a second root of trust in attestations (SEV has explicit support for this), which would mean that a real world attack would require collusion of multiple parties (pick 2 of Hardware vendor, Cloud provider, Software vendor).

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#72

Post by ivegotnoaccount »

janwas wrote: post #67
NavinF wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, the few workloads that benefit from AVX-512 would be better off on a GPU. Also note that it wasn’t well received 2 years ago. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809335

That's a bold claim. What are your sources? The two latest things I worked on, JPEG XL and quicksort, see a 1.4 and 1.6x speedup from AVX-512. That's on SKX and includes the much-maligned throttling. On a system level, I doubt moving those to GPU is helpful.

Also, moving things to the GPU may be good for throughput but bad for latency depending on the workload, since offloading to GPU has a cost and data exchanges too.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#73

Post by bawolff »

inter_netuser wrote: post #63
onedognight wrote: post #57

SGX is used by Signal’s server[0] to allow an open source trust-Intel / trust-their-hardware, but no one else based private contact discovery. [0] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

AKA: "share your contacts with the NSA only"

Even if you dont believe in sgx, the nsa would still have to be in signal's servers somehow, in which case you are probably screwed anyways

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#74

Post by ohthehugemanate »

bawolff wrote: post #73
inter_netuser wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA: "share your contacts with the NSA only"

Even if you dont believe in sgx, the nsa would still have to be in signal's servers somehow, in which case you are probably screwed anyways

Edward Snowden is a public supporter and user of Signal. He's my canary in the coal mine. The moment the US three letter agencies get access to the data on Signal's servers, Snowden's dead. I feel comfortable in the resilience of their architecture as long as he's alive.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#76

Post by WithinReason »

janwas wrote: post #67
NavinF wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, the few workloads that benefit from AVX-512 would be better off on a GPU. Also note that it wasn’t well received 2 years ago. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809335

That's a bold claim. What are your sources? The two latest things I worked on, JPEG XL and quicksort, see a 1.4 and 1.6x speedup from AVX-512. That's on SKX and includes the much-maligned throttling. On a system level, I doubt moving those to GPU is helpful.

If you're processing a lot of data, you're better off moving it to the GPU. If you're processing only a little data, the speed-up doesn't matter. I wonder how wide is the Goldilocks Zone where AVX512 makes a practical difference?

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#77

Post by exfalso »

Syonyk wrote: post #47

Yup. SGX, TSX, all the interesting and complicated stuff seems to be getting deprecated after half a decade or more of "We got it! No, wait, we didn't... uh, this time we got it! Wait, crap, no... uh... but this time! Oh carp. Yeah, you know, screw it." After several of those "Release, revert" cycles, it ends up as a self fulfilling prophecy anyway - it's like the sentiment towards Google's new products you see often…

I agree with a lot of what you write, and I also think we are way beyond that "comprehensibility boundary" when it comes to modern tech stacks. There is just no single person who understands exactly what happens on all levels of the stack when I send this reply.

But also, this process of "we got it, wait we didn't..." is just how real world security works, there is no way around it. Security is not and problem is solved. Security is complex, and takes years of attack incentives and hardening to mature. TLS implementations can use the best crypto algorithms we know of, and we still get Heartbleed. Intel already with the very first release of SGX introduced the TCB recovery mechanism, precisely because they knew users are bound to find vulnerabilities.

There is also a strong hysteresis effect because of the long release cycle of chips. For example, SGX was released in 2015/2016 with Skylake, and then two years later we discovered Meltdown/Spectre and with them a whole new dimension of attacks on the CPU. However, Intel couldn't just release a hotfix for their hardware, it took a lot of time and work to re-design the CPU to be more side-channel resistant, and in the meantime security researchers naturally latched onto these attacks, giving the false impression that the whole idea of secure compute is flawed.

Personally I would not bet on CC tech becoming obsolete, on the contrary, a lot of Big Tech are pumping more and more resources into it, and there is increasing demand from various industries. The tech will stay around, it will mature, and perhaps vendors will even start to introduce HSM-like hardware protection mechanisms if there is enough demand.

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#78

Post by doppioandante »

What is the significance of this when looking at the fact that SGX support has been recently merged into linux main tree?

I was waiting till next Ubuntu LTS to have qemu packaged with SGX support in order to reverse engineer my fingerprint sensor (which is match-on-host, and uses SGX under Windows).

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#79

Post by fancyfredbot »

femto wrote: post #56

Also the note at the bottom of that page: that they are doing away with AVX-512. A bit sad for those who need to squeeze maximum performance out of a CPU. (I gather it lives on in Xeon and Zen 4.)

This was announced some time ago with the first 12th generation processors. Weirdly the hardware is present in those chips and it has since been enabled by some motherboard vendors. https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/msi-reenables-avx512-su...

Re: Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors

#80

Post by yosefk »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #74
bawolff wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you dont believe in sgx, the nsa would still have to be in signal's servers somehow, in which case you are probably screwed anyways

Edward Snowden is a public supporter and user of Signal. He's my canary in the coal mine. The moment the US three letter agencies get access to the data on Signal's servers, Snowden's dead. I feel comfortable in the resilience of their architecture as long as he's alive.

Isn't Snowden alive because the US decided not to kill him? Doesn't sound like killing him is that hard
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