Confidential computing’s core trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist


Vendors are trying to position “confidential computing” as the technical backbone of Europe’s sovereign cloud ambitions. But new research shows that a security protocol used to prove cryptographic trust in the system may have a fundamental architectural flaw.

Confidential computing rests on a mechanism called remote attestation, in which a server cryptographically proves to a client that it is running inside a genuine, unmodified Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) before any sensitive data changes hands. Intel’s product pages promise TDX will “add safeguards to data sovereignty and governance.” Google Cloud describes its confidential computing infrastructure as offering “full, auditable control over access to customer data.”

Read more…
Source:  The Register


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Gatekeeper Bypass: Uncovering Weaknesses in a macOS Security Mechanism

    October 17, 2024

    Unit 42 researchers have found that certain third-party utilities and applications pertaining to archiving, virtualization and Apple’s native command-line tools do not enforce the quarantine attribute. This can pose a threat to the integrity of a security feature on macOS known as Gatekeeper, which is responsible for ensuring that only trusted software runs on the system. ...

  • Cyber Security Association of China calls for cybersecurity review of Intel products sold in China

    October 16, 2024

    The Cyber Security Association of China on Wednesday called for the launch of a systematic review of potential cybersecurity risks in Intel products due to frequent vulnerabilities and high failure rates, in order to effectively safeguard China’s national security and the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese consumers. The association cited four reasons for the review: ...

  • Fake LockBit, Real Damage: Ransomware Samples Abuse AWS S3 to Steal Data

    October 16, 2024

    From infostealer development to data exfiltration, cloud service providers are increasingly being abused by threat actors for malicious schemes. While in this case the ransomware samples we examined contained hard coded AWS credentials, this is specific to this single threat actor and in general, ransomware developers leverage other online services as part of their tactics. In ...

  • Tor Browser and Firefox users should update to fix actively exploited vulnerability

    October 16, 2024

    Mozilla has announced a security fix for its Firefox browser which also impacts the closely related Tor Browser. The new version fixes one critical security vulnerability which is reportedly under active exploitation. To address the flaw, both Mozilla and Tor recommend that users update their browsers to the most current versions available. Firefox users that have ...

  • How Low Can You Go? An Analysis of 2023 Time-to-Exploit Trends

    October 15, 2024

    Mandiant analyzed 138 vulnerabilities that were disclosed in 2023 and that we tracked as exploited in the wild. Consistent with past analyses, the majority (97) of these vulnerabilities were exploited as zero-days (vulnerabilities exploited before patches are made available, excluding end-of-life technologies). Forty-one vulnerabilities were exploited as n-days (vulnerabilities first exploited after patches are available). While ...

  • Westpac and St George customers report third day of difficulties accessing internet banking

    October 15, 2024

    Westpac and subsidiaries including St George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA have been hit by a string of outages. The bank said services were restored on Wednesday afternoon, but some customers continued to report disruptions. Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the government has been in contact with Westpac and described the internet and mobile banking issues as ...