> the client fetches a signed document from the enclave which includes a hash of the running code signed
Why couldn't the enclave claim to be running an older hash?
Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
61–70 of 106 posts
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#62> the client fetches a signed document from the enclave which includes a hash of the running code signed Why couldn't the enclave claim to be running an older hash?
This is enforced by the hardware (that’s where the root of trust goes back to NVDIA+AMD). The hardware will only send back signed enclave hashes of the code it’s running and cannot be coerced by us (or anyone else) into responding with a fake or old measurement.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have to trust the hardware manufacturer (Intel/AMD/NVIDIA) designed their chips to execute the instructions we inspect, so we're assuming trust in vendor silicon either way. The real benefit of confidential computing is to extend that trust to the source code too (the inference server, OS, firmware). Maybe one day we’ll have truly open hardware ;)
Hi Nate. Routinely your various networking-related FOSS tools. Surprising to see you now work in the AI infrastructure space let alone co-founding a startup funded by YC! Tinfoil looks über neat. All the best (: > Maybe one day we'll have truly open hardware At least the RoT/SE if nothing else: https://opentitan.org/
Love Open Titan! RISC-V all the way babe!
The team is bunker: several of my labmates now work there
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#64Does this not require one to trust the hardware? I'm not an expert in hardware root of trust, etc, but if Intel (or whatever chip maker) decides to just sign code that doesn't do what they say it does (coerced or otherwise) or someone finds a vuln; would that not defeat the whole purpose? I'm not entirely sure this is different than "security by contract", except the contracts get bigger and have more technology arou…
I agree, it's lifting trust to the manufacturer (which could still be an improvement over the cloud status quo).
Another (IMO more likely) scenario is someone finds a hardware vulnerability (or leaked signing keys) that let's them achieve a similar outcome.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#65What's your revenue model?
The pricing page implies you're basically reselling access to confidential-wrapped AI instances.
Since you rightly open-sourced the code (AGPL) is there anything stopping the cloud vendors from running and selling access to their own instances of your server-side magic?
Is your secret sauce the tooling to spin up and manage instances and ease customer UX? Do you aim to attract an ecosystem of turnkey, confidential applications running on your platform?
Do you envision an exit strategy that sells said secret sauce and customers to a cloud provider or confidential computing middleware provider?
Ps. Congrats on the launch.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#66Looks great. Not sure how big the market is between "need max privacy, need on-prem" and "don't care, just use what is cheap/popular" tho. Can you talk about how this relates to / is different / is differentiated from what Apple claimed to do during their last WWDC? They called it "private cloud compute". (To be clear, after 11 months, this is still "announced", with no implementation anywhere, as far as I can see.)…
Private Cloud Compute has been in use since iOS 18 released.
It seems that PCC indeed went live with 18.1 - tho not in Europe (which is where I am located). Thanks for the heads up, I will look into this further.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#67Looks great. Not sure how big the market is between "need max privacy, need on-prem" and "don't care, just use what is cheap/popular" tho. Can you talk about how this relates to / is different / is differentiated from what Apple claimed to do during their last WWDC? They called it "private cloud compute". (To be clear, after 11 months, this is still "announced", with no implementation anywhere, as far as I can see.)…
Private Cloud Compute has been live in production for 8 months
It seems that PCC indeed went live with 18.1 - tho not in Europe (which is where I am located). Thanks for the heads up, I will look into this further.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#68What's your revenue model? The pricing page implies you're basically reselling access to confidential-wrapped AI instances. Since you rightly open-sourced the code (AGPL) is there anything stopping the cloud vendors from running and selling access to their own instances of your server-side magic? Is your secret sauce the tooling to spin up and manage instances and ease customer UX? Do you aim to attract an ecosystem…
>Since you rightly open-sourced the code (AGPL) is there anything stopping the cloud vendors from running and selling access to their own instances of your server-side magic?
Sure they can do that. Despite being open source, CC-mode on GPUs is quite difficult to work with especially when you start thinking about secrets management, observability etc, so we’d actually like to work with smaller cloud providers who want to provide this as a service and become competitive with the big clouds.
>Is your secret sauce the tooling to spin up and manage instances and ease customer UX?
Pretty much. Confidential computing has been around a while, and we still don’t see widespread adoption of it, largely because of the difficulty. If we're successful, we absolutely expect there to be a healthy ecosystem of competitors both cloud provider and startup.
>Do you envision an exit strategy that sells that secret sauce to a cloud provider or confidential computing middleware provider?
We’re not really trying to be a confidential computing provider, but more so, a verifiably private layer for AI. Which means we will try to make integration points as seamless as possible. For inference, that meant OpenAI API compatible client SDKs, we will eventually do the same for training/post-training, or MCP/OpenAI Agents SDK, etc. We want our integration points to be closely compatible with existing pipelines.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#69Tinfoil hat on: say you are compelled to execute a FISA warrant and access the LLM data, is it technically possible? What about an Australian or UK style "please add a backdoor". I see you have to trust NVidia etc. so maybe there are such backdoors.
An attacker would need to compromise our build pipeline to publish a backdoored VM image [1] and extract key material to forge an attestation from the hardware [2]. The build process publishes a hash of the code to Sigstore’s transparency log [3], which would make the attack auditable.
That said, a sufficiently resourced attacker wouldn’t need to inject a backdoor at all. If the attacker already possesses the keys (e.g. the attacker IS the hardware manufacturer, or they’ve coerced the manufacturer to hand the keys over), then they would just need to gain access to the host server (which we control) to get access to the hypervisor, then use their keys to read memory or launch a new enclave with a forged attestation. We're planning on writing a much more detailed blog post about "how to hack ourselves" in the future.
We actually plan to do an experiment at DEFCON, likely next year where we gives ssh access to a test machine running the enclave and have people try to exfiltrate data from inside the enclave while keeping the machine running.
[1] https://github.com/tinfoilsh/cvmimage
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#70How large do you wager your moat to be? Confidential computing is something all major cloud providers either have or are about to have and from there it's a very small step to offer LLM-s under the same umbrella. First mover advantage is of course considerable, but I can't help but feel that this market will very quickly be swallowed by the hyperscalers.
Cloud providers aren't going to care too much about this.
I have worked for many enterprise companies e.g. banks who are trialling AI and none of them have any use for something like this. Because the entire foundation of the IT industry is based on trusting the privacy and security policies of Azure, AWS and GCP. And in the decades since they've been around not heard of a single example of them breaking this.
The proposition here is to tell a company that they can trust Azure with their banking websites, identity services and data engineering workloads but not for their model services. It just doesn't make any sense. And instead I should trust a YC startup who statistically is going to be gone in a year and will likely have their own unique set of security and privacy issues.
Also you have the issue of smaller sized open source models e.g. DeepSeek R1 lagging far behind the bigger ones and so you're giving me some unnecessary privacy attestation at the expense of a model that will give me far better accuracy and performance.