Enarx first release

I was on holiday last week, and I took the opportunity not to write a blog post, but while I was sunning myself[1] at the seaside, the team did a brilliant thing: we have our first release of Enarx, and a new look for the website, to boot.

To see the new website, head over to https://enarx.dev. There, you’ll find new updated information about the project, details of how to get involved, and – here’s the big news – instructions for how to download and use Enarx. If you’re a keen Rustacean, you can also go straight to crates.io (https://crates.io/crates/enarx) and start off there. Up until now, in order to run Enarx, you’ve had to do quite a lot of low level work to get things running, run your own github branches, understand how everything fits together and manage your own development environment. This has now all changed.

This first release, version 0.1.1, is codenamed Alamo, and provides an easy way in to using Enarx. As always, it’s completely open source: you can look at every single line of our code. It doesn’t provide a full feature set, but what it does do is allow you, for the first time, to write an application, compile it to WebAssembly, and then run it in one of three Keep[2] types:

1. KVM – this is basically a debugging Keep, in that it doesn’t provide any confidentiality or integrity protection, but it does allow you to get running and to try things even if you don’t have access to specialist hardware. A standard Linux machine should do you fine.
2. SEV – this is a Keep using AMD’s SEV technology, specifically the newer version, SEV-SNP. This requires access to a machine which supports it[3].
3. SGX – this is a Keep using Intel’s SGX technology. Again, this requires access to a machine which supports it[3].

The really important point here is that you’re running the same binary on each of these architectures. No recompilation for different architectures: just plain old WebAssembly[4].

Current support

There’s a lot more work to do, but what do we support at the moment?

• running WebAssembly
• KVM, SEV and SGX Keeps (see above)
• stdin and stdout from/to the host – this is temporary, as the host is untrusted in the Enarx model, but until we have networking support (see below), we wanted to provide a simple way to manage input and output from a Keep.

There’s lots more to come – networking and attestation are both high on the list – but now anyone can start playing with Enarx. And, we hope, submitting enhancement and feature requests, not to mention filing bugs (we know there will be some!): to do so, hop over to https://github.com/enarx/enarx/issues.

To find out more, please head over to the website – there’s loads to see – or join us on chat channel over at https://chat.enarx.dev to find out more and get involved.

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1 – it’s the British seaside, in October, so “sunning” might be a little inaccurate.

2 – a Keep is what we call a TEE instance set up for you to run an application in.

3 – we have AMD and SGX machines available for people who contribute to the project – get in touch!

4 – WebAssembly is actually rather new, but “plain old” sounds better than “vanilla”. Not my favourite ice cream flavour[5].

5 – my favourite basic ice cream flavour is strawberry. Same for milkshakes.