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As a user, can I host the attestation server myself?
[1] https://github.com/tinfoilsh/tinfoil-python [2] https://github.com/tinfoilsh/verifier
We should chat. :)
Heh. I sold Tinfoil Security to synopsys in January 2020. We should chat. :)
How 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.
Looks 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.)…
How 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 pr…
As former CTO of world's largest bank and cloud architect at world's largest hedge fund, this is exactly opposite of my experience with both regulated finance enterprises and the CSPs vying to serve them.
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.
On the contrary, many global banks design for the assumption the "CSP is hostile". What happened to Coinbase's customers the past few months shows why your vendor's insider threat is your threat and your customers' threat.
Granted, this annoys CSPs who wish regulators would just let banks "adopt" the CSP's controls and call it a day.
Unfortunately for CSP sales teams — certainly this could change with recent regulator policy changes — the regulator wins. Until very recently, only one CSP offered controls sufficient to assure your own data privacy beyond a CSP's pinky-swears. AWS Nitro Enclaves can provide a key component in that assurance, using deployment models such as tinfoil.
The only way to guarantee privacy in cloud computing is via homorphic encryption. This approach relies too much on trust. If you have data you are seriously sensitive about, its better for you to run models locally on air gapped instances. If you think this is an overkill, just see what happened to coinbase of recent. [0] [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/15/coinbase-says-hackers-bribed...
> The only way to guarantee privacy in cloud computing is via homorphic encryption No. The only way is to not use cloud computing at all and go on-premise. Which is what companies around the world do today for security or privacy critical workloads.
This point of view may be based on a lack of information about how global finance handles security and privacy critical workloads in high-end cloud.
Global banks and the CSPs that serve them have by and large solved this problem by the late 2010s - early 2020s.
While much of the work is not published, you can look for presentations at AWS reInvent from e.g. Goldman Sachs or others willing to share about it, talking about cryptographic methods, enclaves, formal reasoning over not just code but things like reachability, and so on, to see the edges of what's being done in this space.
Would it be possible to run something like vLLM or TensortRT-llm with tinfoil?
Does 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…
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 ;)