Tag: enarx

5 Rust reflections (from Java)

I’m a (budding) Rustacean.

It’s been a long time since I properly learned a new language – computer or human. Maybe 25 years. That language was Java, and although I’ve had to write little bits of C (very, very little) and Javascript in the meantime, the only two languages I’ve written much actual code in have been Perl and Java. As I’ve posted before, I’m co-founder of a project called Enarx (latest details here), which is written almost entirely in Rust. These days I call myself an “architect”, and it’s been quite a long time since I wrote any production code. In the lead up to Christmas last year (2019), I completed the first significant project I’ve written in quite a few years: an implementation of a set of algorithms around a patent application, in Java. It was a good opportunity to get my head back into code, and I was quite pleased with it. I wrote it with half a mind to compile it into WebAssembly as a candidate workload for Enarx, but actually compiling it turned out to be a bit of a struggle, and work got in the way, so completed a basic implementation, checked it into a private github repository and generally forgot about it.

My involvement with the Enarx project so far has been entirely design and architecture work – plus documentation, marketing, evangelism, community work and the rest, but no coding. I have suggested, on occasion – almost entirely in jest – that I commit some code to the project in Perl, and it’s become a bit of a running joke that this would be the extent of any code I submitted, as possibly my involvement with the project, as it would be immediately rejected. And then, about a week and a half ago, I decided to learn Rust. And then to rewrite (including, where necessarily refactoring) that Java project I wrote a few months ago. Here are some of my thoughts on Rust, from the point of a view of a Java developer with a strong Object-Oriented background.

1. Rust feels familiar

Although many of the tutorials and books you’ll find out there are written with C and C++in mind, there’s enough similarity with Java to make the general language feel familiar. The two tutorials I’ve been using the most are The Rust Programming Language online and Programming Rust in dead tree format, and the latter makes frequent references to similarities and differences to and from other languages, including not only C, C++ and Java, but also Python, Javascript and others. Things like control structures and types are similar enough to Java that they’re generally simple to understand, and although there are some major differences, you should be able to get your head round the basics of the language pretty simply. Beware, however: one of the biggest initial problems I’ve been having is that Rust sometimes feels too familiar, so I start trying to do things in the wrong way, have to back out, and try to work out a better way: a way which is more idiomatic to Rust. I have a long way to go on this!

2. References make sense

In Rust, you end up having to use references. Frankly, referencing and de-referencing variables was something that never made much sense to me when I looked at C or C++, but this time, it feels like I get it. If you’re used to passing Java variables by reference and value, and know when you need to take steps to do so differently in specific situations, then you’re ready to start understanding Rust references. The other thing you need to understand is why Rust needs you to use them: it’s because Rust is very, very careful about memory management, and you don’t have a Garbage Collector to clean up after you wherever you go (as in Java). You can’t just pass Strings (for instance) around willy-nilly: Rust is going to insist that you know the lifetime of a variable, and think about when it’s ready to be “dropped”. This means that you need to think hard about scope, and introduces a complex concept: ownership.

3. Ownership will make sense

Honestly, I’m not there yet. I’ve been learning and coding in Rust for under two weeks, and I’m beginning to get my head around ownership. For me (as, I suspect, for many newcomers), this is the big head-shift around moving to Rust from Java or most other languages: ownership. As I mentioned above, you need to understand when a variable is going to be used, and how long it will live. There’s more to it than that, however, and really getting this is something which feels a little foreign to me as a Java developer: you need to understand about the stack and the heap, a distinction which was sufficiently concealed from me by Java, but something which many C and C++ developers will probably understand much more easily. This isn’t the place to explain the concept (I’ve found the diagrams in Programming Rust particularly helpful), but in order to manage the lifetime of variables in memory, Rust is going to need to know what component owns each one. This gets complicated when you’re used to creating objects and instantiating them with variables from all over the place (as in Java), and requires some significant rethinking. Combining this with explicit marking of lifetimes is the biggest conceptual change that I’m having to perform right now.

4. Cargo is helpful

I honestly don’t use the latest and greatest Java tools properly. When I started to learn Java, it wasn’t even in 1.0, and by the time I finished writing production code on a regular basis, there wasn’t yet any need to pick up the very latest tooling, so it may be that Java is better at this than I remember, but the in-built tools for managing the various pieces of a Rust project, including dependencies, libraries, compilation and testing, are a revelation. The cargo binary just does the right thing, and it’s amazing to watch it do its job when it realises that you’ve made a change to your dependencies, for instance. It will perform automatic tests, optimise automatically, produce documentation – so many useful tasks, all within one package. Combine this with git repositories, and managing projects becomes saner and easier.

5. The compiler is amazing

Last, but very far from least, is the compiler. I love the Rust compiler: it really, really tries to help you. The members of the community[1] that makes and maintains clearly go out of their way to provide helpful guidance to correct you when you make mistakes – and I, for one, have been making many of them. Rather than the oracular pronouncements that may be familiar from other languages’ compilers, you’ll get colour-coded text with warnings and errors, and suggestions as to what you might actually be trying to do. You will even be given output such as For more information about this error, try rustc --explain E0308. When you do try this, you get (generally!) helpful explanation and code snippets. Sometimes, particularly when you’re still working your way into the language, it’s not always obvious what you’re doing wrong, but wading through the errors can help you get your head round the concepts in a way which feels very different to messages I’m used to getting from javac, for example.

Conclusion

I don’t expect ever to be writing lots of production Rust, nor ever truly to achieve guru status – in Rust or any other language, to be honest – but I really think that Rust has a lot to be said for it. Throughout my journey so far, I’ve been nodding my head and thinking “that’s a good way to do that”, or “ah, that makes so much more sense than the way I’m used to”. This isn’t an article about why Rust is such a good language – there are loads of those – nor about the best way to learn Rust – there are lots of those, too – but I can say that I’m enjoying it. It’s challenging, but one thing that the tutorials, books and other learning materials are all strong on is explaining the reasons for the choices that Rust makes, and that’s certainly been helpful to me, both in tackling my frustrations, but also in trying to internalise some of the differences between Java and Rust.

If I can get my head truly into Rust, I honestly don’t think I’m likely to write any Java ever again. I’m not sure I’ve got another 25 years of coding in me, but I think that I’m with Rust for the long haul now. I’m a (budding) Rustacean.

1 – Rust, of course, is completely open source, and the community support for it seems amazing.

An Enarx milestone: binaries

Demoing the same binary in very different TEEs.

This week is Red Hat Summit, which is being held virtually for the first time because of the Covid-19 crisis. The lock-down has not affected the productivity of the Enarx team, however (at least not negatively), as we have a very exciting demo that we will be showing at Summit. This post should be published at 1100 EDT, 1500 BST, 1400 GMT on Tuesday, 2020-04-28, which is the time that the session which Nathaniel McCallum and I recorded will be released to the world. I hope to be able to link to that once it’s released to the world. But what will we be showing?

Well, to set the scene, and to discover a little more about the Enarx project, you might want to read these articles first (also available in Japanese – visit each article of a link):

Enarx, as you’ll discover, is about running workloads in TEEs (Trusted Execution environments), using WebAssembly, in what we call “Keeps”. It’s a mammoth job, particularly as we’re abstracting away the underlying processor architectures (currently two: Intel’s SGX and AMD’s SEV), so that you, the user, don’t need to worry about them: all you need to do is write and compile your application, then request that it be deployed. Enarx, then, has lots of moving parts, and one of the key tasks for us has been to start the work to abstract away the underlying processor architectures so that we can prepare the runtime layers on top. Here’s a general picture of the software layers, and how they sit on top of the hardware platforms:

What we’re announcing – and demoing – today is that we have an initial implementation of code to allow us to abstract away process-based and VM-based types of architecture (with examples for SGX and SEV), so that we can do this:

This seems deceptively simple, but what’s actually going on under the covers is rather more than is exposed in the picture above. The reality is more like this:

This gives more detail: the application that’s running on both architectures (SGX on the left, SEV on the right) is the very same ELF static-PIE binary. To be clear, this is not only the same source code, compiled for different platforms, but exactly the same binary, with the very same hash signature. What’s pretty astounding about this is that in order to make it run on both platforms, the engineering team has had to write two sets of seriously low-level code, including more than a little Assembly language, providing the “plumbing” to allow the binary to run on both.

This is a very big deal, because although we’ve only implemented a handful of syscalls on each platform – enough to make our simple binary run and print out a message – we now have a framework on which we know we can build. And what’s next? Well, we need to expand that framework so that we can then build the WebAssembly layers which will allow WebAssembly applications to run on top:

There’s a long way to go, but this milestone shows that we have an initial framework which we can improve, and on which we can build.

What’s next?

What’s exciting about this milestone from our point of view is that we think it puts Enarx at a stage where more people can join and take part. There’s still lots of low-level work to be done, but it’s going to be easier to split up now, and also to start some of the higher level work, too. Enarx is completely open source, and we do all of our design work in the open, along with our daily stand-ups. You’re welcome to browse our documentation, RFCs (mostly in draft at the moment), raise issues, and join our calls. You can find loads more information on the Enarx wiki: we look forward to your involvement in the project.

Last, and not least, I’d like to take a chance to note that we now have testing/CI/CD resources available for the project with both Intel SGX and AMD SEV systems available to us, all courtesy of Packet. This is amazingly generous, and we both thank them and encourage you to visit them and look at their offerings for yourself!

Isolationism – not a 4 letter word (in the cloud)

Things are looking up if you’re interested in protecting your workloads.

In the world of international relations, economics and fiscal policy, isolationism doesn’t have a great reputation. I could go on, I suppose, if I did some research, but this is a security blog[1], and international relations, fascinating area of study though it is, isn’t my area of expertise: what I’d like to do is borrow the word and apply it to a different field: computing, and specifically cloud computing.

In computing, isolation is a set of techniques to protect a process, application or component from another (or a set of the former from a set of the latter). This is pretty much always a good thing – you don’t want another process interfering with the correct workings of your one, whether that’s by design (it’s malicious) or in error (because it’s badly designed or implemented). Isolationism, therefore, however unpopular it may be on the world stage, is a policy that you generally want to adopt for your applications, wherever they’re running.

This is particularly important in the “cloud”. Cloud computing is where you run your applications or processes on shared infrastructure. If you own that infrastructure, then you might call that a “private cloud”, and infrastructure owned by other people a “public cloud”, but when people say “cloud” on its own, they generally mean public clouds, such as those operated by Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba or others.

There’s a useful adage around cloud computing: “Remember that the cloud is just somebody else’s computer”. In other words, it’s still just hardware and software running somewhere, it’s just not being run by you. Another important thing to remember about cloud computing is that when you run your applications – let’s call them “workloads” from here on in – on somebody else’s cloud (computer), they’re unlikely to be running on their own. They’re likely to be running on the same physical hardware as workloads from other users (or “tenants”) of that provider’s services. These two realisations – that your workload is on somebody else’s computer, and that it’s sharing that computer with workloads from other people – is where isolation comes into the picture.

Workload from workload isolation

Let’s start with the sharing problem. You want to ensure that your workloads run as you expect them to do, which means that you don’t want other workloads impacting on how yours run. You want them to be protected from interference, and that’s where isolation comes in. A workload running in a Linux container or a Virtual Machine (VM) is isolated from other workloads by hardware and/or software controls, which try to ensure (generally very successfully!) that your workload receives the amount of computing time it should have, that it can send and receive network packets, write to storage and the rest without interruption from another workload. Equally important, the confidentiality and integrity of its resources should be protected, so that another workload can’t look into its memory and/or change it.

The means to do this are well known and fairly mature, and the building blocks of containers and VMs, for instance, are augmented by software like KVM or Xen (both open source hypervisors) or like SELinux (an open source capabilities management framework). The cloud service providers are definitely keen to ensure that you get a fair allocation of resources and that they are protected from the workloads of other tenants, so providing workload from workload isolation is in their best interests.

Host from workload isolation

Next is isolating the host from the workload. Cloud service providers absolutely do not want workloads “breaking out” of their isolation and doing bad things – again, whether by accident or design. If one of a cloud service provider’s host machines is compromised by a workload, not only can that workload possibly impact other workloads on that host, but also the host itself, other hosts and the more general infrastructure that allows the cloud service provider to run workloads for their tenants and, in the final analysis, make money.

Luckily, again, there are well-known and mature ways to provide host from workload isolation using many of the same tools noted above. As with workload from workload isolation, cloud service providers absolutely do not want their own infrastructure compromised, so they are, of course, going to make sure that this is well implemented.

Workload from host isolation

Workload from host isolation is more tricky. A lot more tricky. This is protecting your workload from the cloud service provider, who controls the computer – the host – on which your workload is running. The way that workloads run – execute – is such that such isolation is almost impossible with standard techniques (containers, VMs, etc.) on their own, so providing ways to ensure and prove that the cloud service provider – or their sysadmins, or any compromised hosts on their network – cannot interfere with your workload is difficult.

You might expect me to say that providing this sort of isolation is something that cloud service providers don’t care about, as they feel that their tenants should trust them to run their workloads and just get on with it. Until sometime last year, that might have been my view, but it turns out to be wrong. Cloud service providers care about protecting your workloads from the host because it allows them to make more money. Currently, there are lots of workloads which are considered too sensitive to be run on public clouds – think financial, health, government, legal, … – often due to industry regulation. If cloud service providers could provide sufficient isolation of workloads from the host to convince tenants – and industry regulators – that such workloads can be safely run in the public cloud, then they get more business. And they can probably charge more for these protections as well! That doesn’t mean that isolating your workloads from their hosts is easy, though.

There is good news, however, for both cloud service providers and their teants, which is that there’s a new set of hardware techniques called TEEs – Trusted Execution Environments – which can provide exactly this sort of protection[2]. This is rapidly maturing technology, and TEEs are not easy to use – in that it can not only be difficult to run your workload in a TEE, but also to ensure that it’s running in a TEE – but when done right, they do provide the sorts of isolation from the host that a workload wants in order to maintain its integrity and confidentiality[3].

There are a number of projects looking to make using TEEs easier – I’d point to Enarx in particular – and even an industry consortium to promote open TEE adoption, the Confidential Computing Consortium. Things are looking up if you’re interested in protecting your workloads, and the cloud service providers are on board, too.

1 – sorry if you came here expecting something different, but do stick around and have a read: hopefully there’s something of interest.

2 – the best known are Intel’s SGX and AMD’s SEV.

3 – availability – ensuring that it runs fairly – is more difficult, but as this is a property that is also generally in the cloud service provider’s best interest, and something that can can control, it’s not generally too much of a concern[4].

4 – yes, there are definitely times when it is, but that’s a story for another article.

2019年はEnarxの年でした

2020年はデモなど色々なプランを考えています！

 

私にとって2019年はEnarxプロジェクトがほとんどでした。

他のしなければいけない業務もあって、例えば顧客会議、IBM（7月に私の勤めるRed Hatを買収してます）の業務、Kubernetesのセキュリティやパートナー企業と協業など重要なことは色々ありました。しかしEnarxが2019年のハイライトです。

 

年始に私たちは実現できることがあると確信し、内部のリーダーシップチームに対して、達成可能であることの証明を課されました。

その課題に対して、私たちはAMDのSEVチップと五月のボストンでのRed Hat Summitでデモを行い、このブログでアナウンスをしました。

IntelのSGXチップセットと10月のリヨンでのOpen Source Summitでフォローアップをしています。2019年のEnarxの開発でとても大切なことだったと考えています。

 

チーム

 

Enarxは私だけのものではもちろん、ありません。Nathaniel McCallumと共にプロジェクトの共同創立者の一人であることは非常に誇りです。ここまで達成できたのは多くのチームメンバーのおかげですし、オープンソースプロジェクトとして貢献し使用している皆様のおかげです。貢献者ページにはたくさんのメンバーの名前がありますが、まだ全員の名前が挙がっているわけではありません。また、Red Hat内外の何人かの方から頂いたプロジェクトに対するアドバイス、サポートとスポンサリングはとても大切なものです。その皆様の名前を言う許可は得ていないので、ここではお話しせず、丁重に扱う事とします。皆様のサポートとそのお時間を頂けたことに非常に感謝しています。

 

ユースケースとパートナー

 

2019年に成し得た重要なことの一つに、皆さんがどのように「野良状態で」Enarxを使いたいのかをまとめたことと、その比較的詳細な分析を行い、書き上げたことです。

その全てが公開されたわけではないですが、（私が任されていることなんですけどもね）これは実際にEnarxを使用したいと考えているパートナーを見つけるのに不可欠です。まだ公表できませんが、皆さんも聞いたことがあるグローバル企業のいくつかから、また将来的に増えるであろうスタートアップ企業からも、とても興味深いユースケースが挙がってきています。このように興味を持っていただくことは、ロジェクトの実用化に不可欠で、Enarxはただエンジニアの情熱から飛び出しただけのプロジェクトではないと言う事なのです。

 

外部を見ると

 

2019年の重大イベントはLinux FoundationのOpen Source SummitでのConfidential Computing Consortiumの発表でした。私たちRed HatではEnarxはこの新しいグループにぴったりだと考えており、10月の正式発足でプレミアメンバーになったことを嬉しく思っています。これを書いている2019年12月31日時点では、会員数は21、このコンソーシアムは幅広い業界で懸念と興味を惹きつけるものだと言うことがはっきりしてきました。Enarxの信念と目的が裏付けされていると言うことです。

 

2019年に成し遂げたのはコンソーシアムへの参加だけではありません。カンファレンスで講演を行い、このブログ上やNext.redhat.comまたOpensource.comで記事を発表、プレスとの会見、ウェブキャストなどです。一番大切なのは六角形のステッカーを作ったことでしょう！（欲しい方がいらっしゃったらご連絡ください）

 

最後に大切なことを一つ。私たちはプロジェクトを公表していきます。内製のプロジェクトからRed Hat外の参加を促進するために活動しています。詳細は12月17日のBlogをご覧ください。

 

アーキテクチャとコード

 

他に何かあるでしょうか。そうだ、コードですね。そしていくつかのコンポーネントの成熟しつつあるアーキテクチャセットです。

私たちは当然これら全てを外部に公表するつもりですが、まだできていない状態です。すべきことが本当にたくさんあるのです。私たちは皆さんが使用できるようにコードを公開することに尽力していて、2020年に向けデモやそれ以外の大きな計画を立てています。

 

最後に

 

他にも大切なことはもちろんあり、私がWileyから出版するトラスト（信頼性）に関連する本を書いていることです。これはEnarxに深く関連するものです。基本的に、技術はとても「クール」なものですが、Enarxプロジェクトは既存の需要に見合うものですから、Nathanielと私はクラウドやIoT、エッジ、その他機密情報とアルゴリズムが実装される全てのワークロードの管理方法を変えていくいい機会だと考えています。

 

このブログはセキュリティに関するものですが、トラスト（信頼性）と言うものはとても重要な部分だと考えています。Enarxはそれにぴったりと合うのです。ですから、これからも信頼性とEnarxに関するポストをしていきます。Enarx.ioの最新情報に注目していてください。

 

元の記事：https://aliceevebob.com/2019/12/31/2019-a-year-of-enarx/

2019年12月31日　Mike Bursell

 

タグ：セキュリティ、Enarx、オープンソース、クラウド

 

2019: a year of Enarx

We have big plans for demos and more in 2020

2019年はEnarxの年でした

This year has, for me, been pretty much all about the Enarx project.  I’ve had other work that I’ve been doing, including meeting with customers, participating in work with IBM (who acquired the company I work for, Red Hat, in July), looking at Kubernetes security, interacting with partners and a variety of other important pieces, but it’s been Enarx that has defined 2019 for me from a work point of view.

We started off the year with a belief that we could do something, and a challenge from our internal leadership to prove that it was possible.  We did that with a demo on AMD’s SEV chipset at Red Hat Summit in Boston, MA in May, and an announcement of the project on this blog.  We followed up with a demo on Intel’s SGX chipset at Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon in October.  I thought I would mention some of the most important components for the development (in the broadest sense) of Enarx this year.

Team

Enarx is not mine: far from it.  I’m proud to be counted one of the co-founders of the project with Nathaniel McCallum, but we wouldn’t be where we are without a broader team, and as an open source project, it belongs to everyone who contributes and to everyone who uses it.  You’ll find many of the members on the contributors page, but not everybody is up there yet, and there have been some very important people whose contribution has been advice, support and sponsorship of the project both within Red Hat and outside it.  I don’t have permission to mention everybody’s name, so I’m going to play it safe and mention none of them.  You know who you are, and we really appreciate your time.

Use cases – and partners

One of the most important things that we’ve done this year is to work out how people might want to use Enarx “in the wild”, as it were, and to perform some fairly detailed analysis and write-ups.  Not enough of these are externally available yet, which is down to me, but the fact that we had done the work was vital in finding partners who are actually interested in using Enarx for real.  I can’t talk about any of these in public yet, but we have some really interesting use cases from a number of multi-national organisations of whom you will definitely have heard, as well as some smaller start-ups about whom you may well be hearing more in the future.  Having this kind of interest was vital to get buy-in to the project and showed that Enarx wasn’t just a flight of fancy by a bunch of enthusiastic engineers.

Looking outside

The most significant event in the project’s year was the announcement of the Confidential Computing Consortium at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit this year.  We at Red Hat realised that Enarx was a great match for this new group, and was very pleased to be a premier member at the official launch in October.  At time of writing, there are 21 members, and it’s becoming clear that this the consortium has identified an area of concern and interest for the wider industry: this is another great endorsement of the aims and principles of Enarx.

Joining the Consortium hasn’t been the only activity in which we’ve been involved this year.  We’ve spoken at conferences, had articles published (on Alice, Eve and Bob, on now + Next and on Opensource.com), spoken to press, recorded webcasts and more.  Most important (arguably), we have hex stickers (if you’re interested, get in touch!).

Last, but not least, we’ve gone external.  From being an internal project (though we always had our code as open source), we’ve taken a number of measures to try to encourage and simplify involvement by non-Red Hat contributors – see 7 tips for kicking off an open source project for a little more information.

Architecture and code

What else?  Oh, there’s code, and an increasingly mature set of architectures for the various components.  We absolutely plan to make all of this externally visible, and the fact that we haven’t yet is that we’re just running to stand still at the moment: there’s just so much to do.  Our focus is on getting code out there for people to use and contribute to themselves and, without giving anything away, we have some pretty big plans for demos and more in 2020.

Finally

There’s one other thing that’s been important, of course, and that’s the fact that I’m writing a book for Wiley on trust, but I actually see that as very much related to Enarx.  Fundamentally, although the technology is cool, and we think that the Enarx project meets an existing need, both Nathaniel and I believe that there’s a real opportunity for it to change how people manage trust for workloads in the cloud, in IoT, at the Edge and wherever else sensitive data and algorithms need to be executed.

This blog is supposed to be about security, and I’m strongly of the opinion that trust is a very important part of that.  Enarx fits into that, so don’t be surprised to see more posts around trust and about Enarx over the coming year.  Please keep an eye out here and at https://enarx.io for the latest information.

 

 

7 tips for kicking off an open source project

It’s not really about project mechanics at all

オープンソースプロジェクトを始める7つのアドバイス

I’m currently involved – heavily involved – in Enarx, an open source (of course!) project to allow you run sensitive workloads on untrusted hosts.  I’ve had involvement in various open source projects over the years, but this is the first for which I’m one of the founders.  We’re at the stage now where we’ve got a fair amount of code, quite a lot of documentation, a logo and (important!) stickers.  The project should hopefully be included in a Linux Foundation group – the Confidential Computing Consortium – so things are going very well indeed.  We’re at the stage where I thought it might be useful to reflect on some of the things we did to get things going.  To be clear, Enarx is a particular type of project: one that we believe has commercial and enterprise applications.  It’s also not mature yet, and we’ll have hurdles and challenges along the way.  What’s more, the route we’ve taken won’t be right for all projects, but hopefully there’s enough here to give a few pointers to other projects, or people considering starting one up.

The first thing I’d say is that there’s lots of help to be had out there.  I’d start with Opensource.com, where you’ll find lots of guidance.  I’d then follow up by saying that however much of it you follow, you’ll still get things wrong.  Anyway, here’s my list of things to consider.

1. Aim for critical mass

I’m very lucky to work at the amazing Red Hat, where everything we do is open source, and where we take open source and community very seriously.  I’ve heard it called a “critical mass” company: in order to get something taken seriously, you need to get enough people interested in it that it’s difficult to ignore. The two co-founders – Nathaniel McCallum and I – are both very enthusiastic about the project, and have spent a lot of time gaining sponsors within the organisation (you know who you are, and we thank you – we also know we haven’t done a good enough job with you on all occasions!), and “selling” it to engineers to get them interested enough that it was difficult to stop.  Some projects just bobble along with one or two contributors, but if you want to attract people and attention, getting a good set of people together who can get momentum going is a must.

2. Create a demo

If you want to get people involved, then a demo is great.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be polished, but it does need to show that what you’re doing it possible, and that you know what you’re doing.  For early demos, you may be talking to command line output: that’s fine, if what you’re providing isn’t a UI product.  Being able to talk to what you’re doing, and convey both your passion and the importance of the project, is a great boon.  People like to be able to see or experience something, and it’s much easier to communicate your enthusiasm if they have something that’s real which expresses that.

3. Choose a licence

Once you have code, and it’s open source, you want other people to be able to contribute.  This may seem like an unimportant step, but selecting an appropriate open source licence[1] will allow other people to contribute on well-understood and defined terms, making it easier for them, and easier for the organisations for which they work to allow them to be involved.

4. Get documentation

You might think that developer documentation is the most important to get out there – otherwise, how will other people get involved and coding?  I’d disagree, at least to start with.  For a small project, you can probably scale to a few more people just by explaining what the code does, what it should do, and what’s missing.  However, if there’s no documentation available to explain what it’s for, and how it’s going to help people, then why would anyone bother even looking at it?  This doesn’t need to be polished marketing copy, and it doesn’t need to be serious, but it does need to convey to people why they should care.  It’s also going to help you with the first point I mentioned, attaining critical mass, as being able to point to documentation, use cases and the rest will help convince people that you’ve thought through the point of your project.  We’ve used a github wiki as our main documentation hub, and we try to update that with new information as we generate it.  This is an area, to be clear, where we could do better.  But at least we know that.

5. Be visible

People aren’t going to find out about you unless you’re visible.  We were incredibly lucky in that just as we were beginning to get to a level of critical mass, the Confidential Computing Consortium was formed, and we immediately had a platform to increase our exposure.  We have Twitter account, I publish articles on my blog and at Opensource.com, we’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to publish on Red Hat’s now + Next blog, I’ve done interviews the the press and we speak at conferences wherever and whenever we can.  We’re very lucky to have these opportunities, and it’s clear that not all these approaches are appropriate for all projects, but make use of what you can: the more people that know about you, the more people can contribute.

6. Be welcoming

Let’s assume that people have found out about you: what next?  Well, they’re hopefully going to want to get involved.  If they don’t feel welcome, then any involvement they have will taper off soon.  Yes, you need documentation (and, after a while, technical documentation, no matter what I said above), but you need ways for them to talk to you, and for them to feel that they are valued.  We have Gitter channels (https://gitter.im/enarx/), and our daily stand-ups are open to anyone who wants to join.  Recently, someone opened an issue on our issues database, and during the conversation on that thread, it transpired that our daily stand-up time doesn’t work for them given their timezone, so we’re going to ensure that at least one a week does, and we’ve assured that we’ll accommodate them.

7. Work with people you like

I really, really enjoy meeting and working with the members of Enarx project team.  We get on well, we joke, we laugh and we share a common aim: to make Enarx successful.  I’m a firm believer in doing things you enjoy, where possible.  Particularly for the early stages of a project, you need people who are enthusiastic and enjoy working closely together – even if they’re separated by thousands of kilometres[2] geographically.  If they don’t get on, there’s a decent chance that your and their enthusiasm for the project will falter, that the momentum will be lost, and that the project will end up failing.  You won’t always get the chance to choose those with whom you work, but if you can, then choose people you like and get on with.

Conclusion – “people”

I didn’t realise it when I started writing this article, but it’s not really about project mechanics at all: it’s about people.  If you read back, you’ll find the importance of people visible in every tip, even including the one about choosing a licence.  Open source projects aren’t really about code: they’re about people, how they share, how they work together, and how they interact.

I’m certain that your experience of open source projects will vary, and I’d be very surprised if everyone agrees about the top seven things you should do for project success.  Arguably, Enarx isn’t a success yet, and I shouldn’t be giving advice at this stage of our maturity.  But when I think back to all of the open source projects that I can think of which are successful, people feature strongly, and I don’t think that’s a surprise at all.

1 – or “license”, if you’re from the US.

2 – or, in fact, miles.

 

オープンソースプロジェクトを始める7つのアドバイス

プロジェクト手法ではなく…

私は今Enarxプロジェクトに関わっています。とても深く、です。すでにご存知かもしれませんが、これはオープンソースのプロジェクトで、信頼できないホスト上で機密性の高いワークロードの実行を可能にするプロジェクトです。

 

何年もオープンソースプロジェクトに関わってきましたが、このプロジェクトで初めて私は共同創立者となりました。

私たちは現状、コードや文書を十分用意し、ロゴもステッカーも（これ重要！）用意できている段階です。

 

プロジェクトはLinux Foundationグループ（Confidential Computing Consortium)に含まれるはずなので、順調です。さらにプロジェクトを加速させるためにも内容に関してもお伝えしていったほうがいいでしょう。はっきりさせておくと、Enarxは商用とエンタープライズアプリケーションになるプロジェクトです。十分には成熟しておらず、まだまだハードルやチャレンジがあるかもしれません。さらに言うと、私たちの歩んできた道は全てのプロジェクトも当てはまらないかもしれませんが、他のプロジェクトやこれからプロジェクトを始めようとする人への指針になればと思っています。

 

ここまで来るにはたくさんのサポートがあったことをまずお伝えします。

私はOpenSource.comから始めましたが、ここではたくさんのガイドが載っています。それに従っても間違ってしまうこともあるかもしれません。ただ、以下に考慮すべき点を挙げておきます。

 

1　クリティカルマスを目標に

 

私は幸いにもRed Hatと言う素晴らしい職場で働いています。ここでは全てのものがオープンソースですし、オープンソースとそのコミュニティを非常に重要だと考えています。そこで「クリティカルマス」企業と言うものを耳にしました。物事を実際に行っていくには十分な人々の関心が必要で、人々が無視できないものとする必要があるということです。共同創立者のNathaniel McCallumと私はプロジェクトに情熱的で、組織内でスポンサーを得ることに時間をかけました。（誰のことだかわかりますよね、皆さんに感謝です！）そしてエンジニア達に「売り込み」をして惹き込み、プロジェクトが止まれなくなるくらいほどにしました。

プロジェクトのいくつかは一人二人の貢献者しか得ることができずもたついてしまいますが、人々の興味を惹きつけるには、どんどん進めてくれる、ある程度の人数を集めることが必須なのです。

 

2　デモ

 

人々を巻き込みたければデモをすると良いでしょう。洗練されている必要はなく、しようとしていることが実現可能であること、あなたが成し得たいことを示さなければいけません。初期段階のデモではコマンドラインの出力だけでしょうが、UIプロダクトを提供するのでなければ、それでもいいんです。成し遂げようとすることと情熱、プロジェクトの大切さを伝えることが有益なのです。人は何かを「見たい」「体験したい」ので、形にしてやる気を見せることが近道なのです。

 

3　ライセンスを選ぶ

コードをオープンソースで作ると、他の人にも貢献してもらいたくなるでしょう。これはあまり重要ではなく、正しいオープンソースのライセンスを選択することが他の人の貢献度を高め、定義された用語の理解を深め、その貢献する人働いている組織とその人たち自身の貢献するハードルを下げるのです。

 

4　文書作成

 

開発者文書が最重要だと考えるかもしれません。それなければどうやって人が貢献してコードを書くことができるでしょうか。

 

初めのうちは必要ないと思っています。小さなプロジェクトではコードが何をするものか、何をさせたいか、何が欠けているかいるか、の説明をすることで何人かの人を巻き込むことができます。

しかしコードが何をするものでどう便利か説明する文書がないのに、どうやってたくさんの人が時間を割いてくれるでしょうか。

 

文書といっても、ちゃんとしたマーケティング用のものだったり正式なものである必要はなくて、どうしてそれをしなくてはいけないかと皆さんに伝えるものでなければいけません。

これは一番目のポイント、クリティカルマスに注力することにも通じています。文書、ユースケースを示すことで、「ポイント」でプロジェクトが実現したいことに説得力を持たせるのに役立ちます。

 

私たちはgithubウィキをメインの文書置き場にしていて、作成と同時にアップデートしています。これはもう少し改善できるかと思います。

 

5　見えるプロジェクト

 

プロジェクトがちゃんと見える状態でないと見つけてもらえません。私たちのプロジェクトはとてもラッキーで、Confidential Computing Consortiumができた上にそこで見せられるだけのプラットフォームをすぐに作ることができたので、クリティカルマスに届く状態です。

 

Twitterのアカウントもあり（@enarxproject）このブログとOpensource.comで記事も出しています。Red Hatのhttps://next.redhat.com/にてブログを出す機会にも恵まれ、プレスのインタビューも受けましたし出来るだけカンファレンスでも講演しています。私たちにはこのような良い機会がありましたが、全てのプロジェクトに適切なアプローチではないかもしれません。しかし知ってもらうことで、もっとたくさんの人々に貢献してもらえます。

 

6　歓迎しましょう

世間に知って頂けたとしましょう。次は何ができるでしょうか。そう、皆さんにプロジェクトに参加したいと思って頂きたいですよね。歓迎してもらえなければその参加数は少なくなって行きます。また上の方で私が何を言ったかに関わらず、しばらくすると技術文書も必要になります。そしてその人たちがあなたと話し合う方法が必要ですね。そうすることで評価されていると感じますから。

 

私たちの場合、Gitter（https://gitter.im/enarx/）で、毎日のスタンドアップ会議には参加したい人がみんな参加できます。最近ではそ課題データベース（https://github.com/enarx/enarx/issues）をGithubに作成しタコとで、スレッドの会話でタイムゾーンがあることから毎日のスタンドアップ会議の時間が合っていないことが明らかになりました。ので、会議の数を少なくとも週一とする配慮をしたのです。

 

7　仲の良い人と活動しましょう

 

私はとてもとてもEnarxプロジェクトチームのみんなと働くことが楽しいです。楽しく過ごし、冗談をかわし、笑って、共通の目標をシェアしています。Enarxの成功のためです。出来るだけ楽しんですること、それが大切だと思います。特にプロジェクトの初期段階では情熱的な人と楽しく仕事できる人が必要です。例えその人が地理的には数千キロ（マイル？）離れた場所にいても、です。そのように参加できなければ情熱もどんどん先細ってくるでしょうし勢いも失われ、プロジェクトは失敗に終わるでしょう。一緒に活動する人は選べるわけではないでしょうが、できればあなたの仲が良い人を選びましょう。

 

結論：「人」です。

 

この記事を書き始めるまでは気づきませんでしたが、全くプロジェクト手法が問題ではないのです。

 

人、です。

 

読み返せばどのアドバイスにも人の大切さが述べてあり、ライセンスの選び方にも、です。オープンソースプロジェクトとはコードではないのです。人なのです。どのようにシェアし、一緒に活動し交流するかなのです。

 

オープンソースプロジェクトはそれぞれ異なるものでしょうから、この7つのアドバイスが全て当てはまることはないでしょう。間違いなくEnarxはまだ成功と言い切れるものではありませんので、今の段階でこのようなアドバイスをすべきでないのかもしれません。しかし成功してきた今までのオープンソースプロジェクトを思い起こすと、やはり人と言うものはとても大切なのです。

 

元の記事：https://aliceevebob.com/2019/12/17/7-tips-for-kicking-off-an-open-source-project/

2019年12月7日　Mike Bursell

 

タグ：オープンソース

 

Confidential computing – the new HTTPS?

Security by default hasn’t arrived yet.

Over the past few years, it’s become difficult to find a website which is just “http://…”.  This is because the industry has finally realised that security on the web is “a thing”, and also because it has become easy for both servers and clients to set up and use HTTPS connections.  A similar shift may be on its way in computing across cloud, edge, IoT, blockchain, AI/ML and beyond.  We’ve know for a long time that we should encrypt data at rest (in storage) and in transit (on the network), but encrypting it in use (while processing) has been difficult and expensive.  Confidential computing – providing this type of protection for data and algorithms in use, using hardware capabilities such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) – protects data on hosted system or vulnerable environments.

I’ve written several times about TEEs and, of course, the Enarx project of which I’m a co-founder with Nathaniel McCallum (see Enarx for everyone (a quest) and Enarx goes multi-platform for examples).  Enarx uses TEEs, and provides a platform- and language-independent deployment platform to allow you safely to deploy sensitive applications or components (such as micro-services) onto hosts that you don’t trust.  Enarx is, of course, completely open source (we’re using the Apache 2.0 licence, for those with an interest).  Being able to run workloads on hosts that you don’t trust is the promise of confidential computing, which extends normal practice for sensitive data at rest and in transit to data in use:

  • storage: you encrypt your data at rest because you don’t fully trust the underlying storage infrastructure;
  • networking: you encrypt your data in transit because you don’t fully trust the underlying network infrastructure;
  • compute: you encrypt your data in use because you don’t fully trust the underlying compute infrastructure.

I’ve got a lot to say about trust, and the word “fully” in the statements above is important (I actually added it on re-reading what I’d written).  In each case, you have to trust the underlying infrastructure to some degree, whether it’s to deliver your packets or store your blocks, for instance.  In the case of the compute infrastructure, you’re going to have to trust the CPU and associate firmware, just because you can’t really do computing without trusting them (there are techniques such as homomorphic encryption which are beginning to offer some opportunities here, but they’re limited, and the technology still immature).

Questions sometimes come up about whether you should fully trust CPUs, given some of the security problems that have been found with them and also whether they are fully secure against physical attacks on the host in which they reside.

The answer to both questions is “no”, but this is the best technology we currently have available at scale and at a price point to make it generally deployable.  To address the second question, nobody is pretending that this (or any other technology) is fully secure: what we need to do is consider our threat model and decide whether TEEs (in this case) provide sufficient security for our specific requirements.  In terms of the first question, the model that Enarx adopts is to allow decisions to be made at deployment time as to whether you trust a particular set of CPU.  So, for example, of vendor Q’s generation R chips are found to contain a vulnerability, it will be easy to say “refuse to deploy my workloads to R-type CPUs from Q, but continue to deploy to S-type, T-type and U-type chips from Q and any CPUs from vendors P, M and N.”

Enarx goes multi-platform

Now with added SGX!

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.

What is confidential computing?

Industry interest has been high, and overwhelmingly positive.

On Wednesday, 21st August, 2019 (just under a week ago, at time of writing), Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation announced the intent to form the Confidential Computing Consortium, with members including Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent.  I’m particularly proud as Red Hat (my employer) is one of those[1], and I spent the preceding few weeks and days working very hard to ensure that we would be listed as one of the planned founding members.

“Confidential Computing” sounds like a lofty goal, and it is.  We’ve known for ages that you should encrypt sensitive data at rest (in storage), in transit (on the network), but confidential computing, as defined by the consortium, is about doing the same for sensitive data – and algorithms – in use.  The consortium plans to encourage industry to use hardware technologies generally called Trust Execution Environments to allow applications and processes to be encrypted as they are running.

This may sound somewhat familiar to those who follow my blog, and it should: Enarx, an open source project launched by Red Hat, was announced as one of the projects that should be part of the initial launch.  I’ve written about Enarx in several places:

Additionally, you’ll find lots of information on the introduction page of the Enarx wiki.

The press release from the Linux Foundation lists the following goals for the Confidential Computing Consortium (my emboldening):

The Confidential Computing Consortium will bring together hardware vendors, cloud providers, developers, open source experts and academics to accelerate the confidential computing market; influence technical and regulatory standards; and build open source tools that provide the right environment for TEE development. The organization will also anchor industry outreach and education initiatives.

Enarx, of course, fits perfectly into this description, as per the text in bold.  Beyond that, however, is the alignment that there is with the other aims of the Enarx project, and the opportunities with which a wider consortium presents us.  The addition of hardware vendors gives us – and the other participants – opportunities to discuss implementations (hardware and software) in an open environment, cloud providers and other users will give us great use cases, and academic involvement broadens the likelihood of quick access to new ideas and research.

We also expect industry and regulatory standards to be forthcoming, and a need for education as the more sectors and industries engage with confidential computing: the consortium provides a framework to engage in related activities.

It’s early days for the Confidential Computing Consortium, but I’m really hopeful and optimistic.  Already, the openness displayed between the planned members on both technical and non-technical collaboration has gone far beyond what I would have expected.  The industry interest – as evidenced by press and community activities – has been high, and overwhelmingly positive. Fans of Enarx – and confidential computing generally – should be excited by the prospect of greater visibility and collaboration.  After all, isn’t that what open source is about in the first place?

1 – this seems like a good place to point out that the views in this article and blog are my own, and may not represent those of my employer, of the Confidential Computing Consortium, the Linux Foundation or any other body.