Comment by Tuna-Fish
11 hours ago
Yet less than 20% of the 80+ major vulnerabilities in confidential computing have been found by cloud companies, with the majority being found by universities and independent researchers.
It's not actually in their interest to look too closely. They know they are selling snake oil, and they do not care if it works. The only function of the technology, as far as they are concerned, is to be something they can market to customers who are scared at running on public cloud, and either they never intend to exploit it, in which case it doesn't matter if it doesn't work, or they do, in which case they don't want the vulnerabilities to be found and fixed. Either way, there is no upside to them for going spelunking.
> It's not actually in their interest to look too closely. They know they are selling snake oil, and they do not care if it works.
I can tell you from direct experience on the inside at AWS that they care tremendously about virtualization security.
It's why they never let two tenants share a physical core simultaneously; they were prepared against side-channel attacks before Spectre and Meltdown were discovered.
It's why they never supported Intel SGX, preferring instead to sequester processors for confidential workloads (Nitro Enclaves), and why modern EC2 instances support memory encryption (Graviton + AMD SEV-SNP).
It's why, when you improperly remove a chassis from its cabinet, a mechanism destroys a key component containing the machine's attestation and encryption keys, rendering it useless.
It's why they delegated a large amount of security surface, including practically all I/O functions, to their off-CPU Nitro card.
Is this a fair comparison? Why would we know about a cloud provider finding a vulnerability in their own product? Wouldn’t that be kept internal?
Vulnerabilities are typically fixed, and then reported.
Reported to whom? In this case, it's the cloud provider itself.