Enarx 0.3.0 (Chittorgarh Fort)

I usually post on a Tuesday, but this week I wanted to wait for a significant event: the release Enarx v0.3.0, codenamed “Chittorgarh Fort”. This happened after I’d gone to bed, so I don’t feel too bad about failing to post on time. I announced Enarx nearly three years ago, in the article Announcing Enarx on the 7th May 2019. and it’s admittedly taken us a long time to get to where we are now. That’s largely because we wanted to do it right, and building up a community, creating a start-up and hiring folks with the appropriate skills is difficult. The design has evolved over time, but the core principles and core architecture are the same as when we announced the project.

You can find more information about v0.3.0 at the release page, but I thought I’d give a few details here and also briefly add to what’s on the Enarx blog about the release.

What’s Enarx?

Enarx is a deployment framework for running applications within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). We provide a WebAssembly runtime and – this is new functionality that we’ve started adding in this release – attestation so that you can be sure that your application is protected within a TEE instance.

What’s new in v0.3.0?

A fair amount of the development for this release has been in functionality which won’t be visible to most users, including a major rewrite of the TEE/host interface component that we call sallyport. You will, however, notice that TLS support has been added to network connections from applications within the Keep. This is transparent to the application, so “Where does the certificate come from?” I hear you ask. The answer to that is from the attestation service that’s also part of this release. We’ll be talking more about that in further releases and articles, but key to the approach we’re taking is that interactions with the service (we call it the “Steward”) is pretty much transparent to users and applications.

How can I get involved?

What can you do to get involved? Well, visit the Enarx website, look at the code and docs over at our github repositories (please star the project!), get involved in the chat. The very best thing you can do, having looked around, is to write some applications and run them in an Enarx Keep. And then tell us about your experience. If it worked first time, then wow! We’re still very much in development, but we want to amass a list of applications that are known to work within Enarx, so tell us about it. If it doesn’t work, then please also tell us about it, and have a look at our issues page to see if you’re the first person to run across this problem. If you’re not, then please add your experiences to an existing issue, but if you are, then create a new one.

Enarx isn’t production ready, but it’s absolutely ready for initial investigations (as shown by our interns, who created a set of demos for v0.2.0, curated and aided by our community manager Nick Vidal).

Why Chittorgarh Fort?

It’s worth having a look at the Wikipedia entry for the fort: it’s really something! We decided, when we started creating official releases, that we wanted to go with the fortification theme that Enarx has adopted (that’s why you deploy applications to Enarx Keeps – a keep is the safest part of a castle). We started with Alamo, then went to Balmoral Castle, and then to Chittorgarh Fort (we’re trying to go with alphabetically sequential examples as far as we can!). I suggested Chittorgarh Fort to reflect the global nature of our community, which happens to include a number of contributors from India.

Who was involved?

I liked the fact that the Enarx blog post mentioned the names of some (most?) of those involved, so I thought I’d copy the list of github account names from there, with sincere thanks:

@MikeCamel @npmccallum @haraldh @connorkuehl @lkatalin @mbestavros @wgwoods @axelsimon @ueno @ziyi-yan @ambaxter @squidboylan @blazebissar @michiboo @matt-ross16 @jyotsna-penumaka @steveeJ @greyspectrum @rvolosatovs @lilienbm @CyberEpsilon @kubkon @nickvidal @uudiin @zeenix @sagiegurari @platten @greyspectrum @bstrie @jarkkojs @definitelynobody @Deepansharora27 @mayankkumar2 @moksh-pathak

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Rahultalreja11 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons