Toward Confidential Cloud Computing • Hacker News Board

Re: Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

#11

Post by bpye » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #5

We need not just confidential computing but censorship proof computing. I don’t think the “cloud” is the model to grant either because it is centralized.

What do you mean by this? A cloud provider can always choose to not run a VM, how would we provide censorship proof compute?

Re: Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

#12

Post by petertodd » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

ENOTTY wrote: post #10

jnwatson wrote: post #6

Confidential computing is one of those “nerd snipes”. It is really interesting from a technical challenges and academic research perspective. Practically, hyperjacking or compromise through the cloud provider is really low on the list of security issues.

I think Confidential Computing undersells the idea of "Attested Computing". For example, when users send data into the cloud, remote attestation can give them some confidence that data will be used according to the terms of consent.

For example, Signal uses Intel SGX's remote attestation to attest to the privacy of your contact and social graph data: https://medium.com/@maniacbolts/signal-increases-their-relia...

Re: Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

#13

Post by jiehong » Sat, Mar 13, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

A few days ago, a post about Intel hardware accelerated homomorphic encryption might show a better way: if an OS is running but the server cannot know what’s running, then you no longer need to trust that hardware.

It’s trusted computing on untrusted hardware.

It’s similar to how you send encrypted TLD traffic over untrusted networks.

Re: Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

#14

Post by eqvinox » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

ENOTTY wrote: post #8

eqvinox wrote: post #4

> At the lowest level of the stack, the hardware must be able to provide a TEE (trusted execution environment) that isolates the code and data of a given confidential workload from any other code running in a system—including code running at the highest privilege levels. [...] This in turn requires a hardware root of trust to hold the platform root secrets and signing keys, and a public-key infrastructure to endorse…

What features of a hardware platform would cause you to trust it?

Being able to order two (with minimized overlap in order procedure) and comparing them to establish a baseline. Then installing my own keys into it before shipping them of to a hoster who puts them in a rack.

Re: Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

#15

Post by eqvinox » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

bpye wrote: post #9

eqvinox wrote: post #4

> At the lowest level of the stack, the hardware must be able to provide a TEE (trusted execution environment) that isolates the code and data of a given confidential workload from any other code running in a system—including code running at the highest privilege levels. [...] This in turn requires a hardware root of trust to hold the platform root secrets and signing keys, and a public-key infrastructure to endorse…

How would you know to trust the platform you are running on without some sort of hardware key and attestation? You need to be able to determine from your guest that you are running in this confidential environment rather than in some emulation, and I don’t know of any other way to do this than attestation. Additionally we are not talking about separate TPMs today much of the time, rather there will be some environmen…

How would you know to trust the platform you are running on with some sort of hardware key and attestation?

I don't know of any way to do this, period.

Re: Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

#16

Post by nonameiguess » Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #5

We need not just confidential computing but censorship proof computing. I don’t think the “cloud” is the model to grant either because it is centralized.

This is simply not possible. Even if you could get enough radio line of sight p2p nodes online to bypass centralized fiber backbone providers, the government in charge of the land your towers are on can still shut you down. The only censorship free computing is purely locally networked. There are no global communication channels that can't be blocked.