Yesterday, Nathaniel McCallum and I presented a session “Confidential Computing and Enarx” at Open Source Summit Europe. As well as some new information on the architectural components for an Enarx deployment, we had a new demo. What’s exciting about this demo was that it shows off attestation and encryption on Intel’s SGX. Our initial work focussed on AMD’s SEV, so this is our first working multi-platform work flow. We’re very excited, and particularly as this week a number of the team will be attending the first face to face meetings of the Confidential Computing Consortium, at which we’ll be submitting Enarx as a project for contribution to the Consortium.
The demo had been the work of several people, but I’d like to call out Lily Sturmann in particular, who got things working late at night her time, with little time to spare.
What’s particularly important about this news is that SGX has a very different approach to providing a TEE compared with the other technology on which Enarx was previously concentrating, SEV. Whereas SEV provides a VM-based model for a TEE, SGX works at the process level. Each approach has different advantages and offers different challenges, and the very different models that they espouse mean that developers wishing to target TEEs have some tricky decisions to make about which to choose: the run-time models are so different that developing for both isn’t really an option. Add to that the significant differences in attestation models, and there’s no easy way to address more than one silicon platform at a time.
Which is where Enarx comes in. Enarx will provide platform independence both for attestation and run-time, on process-based TEEs (like SGX) and VM-based TEEs (like SEV). Our work on SEV and SGX is far from done, but also we plan to support more silicon platforms as they become available. On the attestation side (which we demoed yesterday), we’ll provide software to abstract away the different approaches. On the run-time side, we’ll provide a W3C standardised WebAssembly environment to allow you to choose at deployment time what host you want to execute your application on, rather than having to choose at development time where you’ll be running your code.
This article has sounded a little like a marketing pitch, for which I apologise. As one of the founders of the project, alongside Nathaniel, I’m passionate about Enarx, and would love you, the reader, to become passionate about it, too. Please visit enarx.io for more information – we’d love to tell you more about our passion.
Alice, Eve and Bob - a security blog 
4 thoughts on “Enarx goes multi-platform”