Unifying Confidential Attestation - Tobin Feldman-FItzthum & Dov Murik, IBM
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 08/10/2022

Unifying Confidential Attestation - Tobin Feldman-FItzthum & Dov Murik, IBM

With the recent rise of several confidential computing technologies, the term attestation has become overloaded. Different platforms offer attestations with different properties and flows, none of which match with traditional techniques. This talk will highlight crucial differences between SEV-ES, SEV-SNP, and Intel TDX. This talk will also discuss strategies for reconciling these differences and unifying confidential attestation. One approach is for each platform to support a secure vTPM backed by the hardware root of trust. This would allow standardization between platforms and between confidential and traditional workloads. This talk will discuss the feasibility and complexities of implementing and deploying secure vTPMs. This talk will also discuss the Confidential Containers Attestation Agent, another approach for unified attestation, that does not require extensive guest or host support. This talk will also highlight related approaches such as those proposed in the Libvirt community and offer some conclusions about where standardization makes the most sense.