At first I thought this is related to the Oak server: https://github.com/oakserver/oak
Oak was also the original name of the language that became Java.
Project Oak: Meaningful control of data in distributed systems
51–55 of 55 posts
Re: Project Oak: Meaningful control of data in distributed systems
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A bit surprised that it’s written in rust, rather than Go. I suppose rust can take advantage of more low level apis, plus no overhead of garbage collection. It’s security-focused technology. Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area.
> Rust has huge advantages over Go in this area. Could you name some advantages? I would agree Rust has huge advantages compared to C/C++, and Rust also has a much bigger presence in the "security space". But I would say that's more because of Rust's lack of GC, smaller footprint which works in embedded systems etc. I guess you could say that Rust's type system being more expressive might eliminate certain classes of…
I think lack of union/sum types, i.e. lack of compiler exhaustivity checks on cases is pretty relevant here. For security applications the goal is maximum stringency w.r.t. correctness so I think “huge advantage “ isn’t an exaggeration regarding sum types. It’s not like “have you checked all cases” is an unimportant question when trying to prove correctness.
Re: Project Oak: Meaningful control of data in distributed systems
#53The lede is a little buried in that README [1]: ## Sealed Computing A canonical use of Oak is to build privacy-preserving sealed computing applications. In a sealed computing application, a node (usually a client device) sends data to an enclave application (usually a server), which processes data without the service provider hosting the enclave application being able to see the inputs, outputs, or side effects of th…
Sounds like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
It both predates the Apple approach and is more thorough. I cannot inspect or ensure the software BoM of my image with Apple’s approach, I just have to trust them. With Oak you have trust down to the hardware.
Re: Project Oak: Meaningful control of data in distributed systems
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
But can it deliver ads?
It’s a google project, that’s probably the first use case they considered
It’s really apples and oranges, Oak is about being able to execute code without side effects, even when it’s running in an environment you don’t provide. If it gets extended to the phone you can snark about ads, but really it would only be able to address whether any data associated with your viewing an ads escapes to a third party. So it would largely make ads be more like a billboard vs the way they work today. But that’s speculation, Oak isn’t trying to make the world safe from advertisers, it’s trying to make your data safe from being used in ways you didn’t permit, even when it’s being operated on in an environment you didn’t provide.
Re: Project Oak: Meaningful control of data in distributed systems
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
does it really? aside from a handful of crates and the default std hashmap i being slow but cryptographically sound: I would not have assumed so. Go usage inside Google is actually quite low, people talk a lot about Go being a google project but in reality its a project made by some people who work at Google. When I last checked it was a bronze supported language (with C++, Python and Java being Gold).
Python has first class support at Google? Didn't they just fire their entire Python team?
Roughly, yes, but they didn’t stop doing the work. It was moved to another set of people.