If you have confidential compute(Intel TDX or AMD SEV) available from the cloud provider then it is feasible, provided you trust the CPU manufacturer. They should provide capabilities that allow you to perform remote attestation and ensure the virtual machine is running in the protected mode. Hypervisors running these types of machines usually can’t access the memory of the virtual machine, not even the registers.
Of course, nothing guarantees there won’t be a vulnerability that breaks it(e.g. side channel attacks), but right now the technology exists where you can run software in the cloud, protected from the provider…
That’s neat. Looks like that’s more recent than my most recent experience doing cloud work, but fully support it.
When I left there was some anti-fraud work being discussed around snooping on everyone’s executing processes to see who is doing bad things, and alerting when and if certain binaries were detected, and that was a little… gross.
Though, regardless of technical fixes, you’re still at the mercy of politics, policies, and people not doing sketchy shit. And, I’d also bet that not all of the smaller cloud providers are going to be doing the work for TDX or SEV implementations, so there’s still a big leap of trust you need of your provider, regardless of the existence of tech that could mitigate those issues.
If you have confidential compute(Intel TDX or AMD SEV) available from the cloud provider then it is feasible, provided you trust the CPU manufacturer. They should provide capabilities that allow you to perform remote attestation and ensure the virtual machine is running in the protected mode. Hypervisors running these types of machines usually can’t access the memory of the virtual machine, not even the registers.
Of course, nothing guarantees there won’t be a vulnerability that breaks it(e.g. side channel attacks), but right now the technology exists where you can run software in the cloud, protected from the provider…
That’s neat. Looks like that’s more recent than my most recent experience doing cloud work, but fully support it.
When I left there was some anti-fraud work being discussed around snooping on everyone’s executing processes to see who is doing bad things, and alerting when and if certain binaries were detected, and that was a little… gross.
Though, regardless of technical fixes, you’re still at the mercy of politics, policies, and people not doing sketchy shit. And, I’d also bet that not all of the smaller cloud providers are going to be doing the work for TDX or SEV implementations, so there’s still a big leap of trust you need of your provider, regardless of the existence of tech that could mitigate those issues.