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:

  • Cyberattack forces First American to take some IT systems offline

    December 22, 2023

    First American, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, suffered a malware attack that forced the company to shut some of its systems down, including its website. At press time, the official website firstam.com was still offline, while a dedicated notification site – firstamupdate.com – was set up. There is a short notification ...

  • Indian IT services giant HCL Technologies hit by ransomware

    December 22, 2023

    Indian IT giant HCL Technologies apparently suffered a significant ransomware attack. Multiple media sources are claiming that the company filed a new report with the National Stock Exchange of India, in which it describes falling prey to a limited ransomware attack, stating that it “has become aware of a ransomware incident in an isolated cloud environment ...

  • How Outlook notification sounds can lead to zero-click exploits

    December 21, 2023

    An Akamai researcher has found two vulnerabilities in Windows that can be combined to achieve a full, zero-click remote code execution (RCE) in Outlook. Both vulnerabilities were responsibly disclosed to Microsoft and addressed in the August 2023 and October 2023 patch Tuesdays, so the researcher felt it was no problem to disclose their findings. The first ...

  • Bandook – A Persistent Threat That Keeps Evolving

    December 21, 2023

    Bandook malware is a remote access trojan that has been continuously developed since it was first detected in 2007. It has been used in various campaigns by different threat actors over the years. FortiGuard Labs identified a new Bandook variant being distributed via a PDF file this past October. This PDF file contains a shortened URL ...

  • Sneaky GPU.zip technique steals sensitive information from your graphics card

    December 21, 2023

    Researchers from four top American universities have uncovered a new way for threat actors to sneakily access visual information from your graphics card while you’re online and browsing certain websites. The researchers call this threat “GPU.zip,” because it takes advantage of the hidden data compression methods used by modern graphics processing units (GPUs) to leak visual ...

  • Why Is an Australian Footballer Collecting My Passwords?

    December 20, 2023

    Unit 42 researchers have observed threat actors using malicious JavaScript samples to steal sensitive information by abusing popular survey sites, low-quality hosting and web chat APIs. In some campaigns, attackers created chatbots that they registered to someone noteworthy such as an Australian footballer. Other malware campaigns they saw included both web skimmers injected into compromised sites ...