The Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) was present at the 25th edition of Black Hat USA and the 30th edition of DEF CON.
At Intel’s booth for Black Hat, there was a big effort towards bringing awareness to Confidential Computing, including the distribution of outreach material from the Confidential Computing Consortium, as well as sessions from Anjuna (“Confidential Computing 101”) and Fortanix (“Confidential Computing AI & Intel SGX: accelerating the use of AI/ML”).
One of the highlights of Black Hat was the responsible disclosure of the ÆPIC Leak by researchers Pietro Borrello (Sapienza University of Rome) and Andreas Kogler (Graz University of Technology) and their collaboration with Intel to mitigate the vulnerability. After their session at Black Hat, the researchers and their colleagues met with the Confidential Computing Consortium representatives and shared how they worked closely together with Intel to follow responsible vulnerability disclosure practices. Intel has provided a microcode update for processors with Intel SGX to enable support to clear buffers and mitigate potential exposure of sensitive stale data when exiting Intel SGX enclaves.
At DEF CON, the Confidential Computing Consortium was mostly present at the Crypto and Privacy Village, which provides a forum for the hacker community to share knowledge and discuss cryptography and privacy.
Community members of the Enarx project gave two talks at the Crypto and Privacy Village: “Owned or pwned? No peekin’ or tweakin’!” and “Cryptle: a secure multi-party Wordle clone with Enarx”. The talks were presented by Richard Zak, Tom Dohrman, and Nick Vidal, with assistance from Ben Fischer from Red Hat.
We would like to thank attendees and organizers of Black Hat, DEF CON, the Crypto and Privacy Village, as well as staff and members of the Confidential Computing Consortium, including representatives from Anjuna, Fortanix, Intel, Profian, and Red Hat/IBM.
