Confidential Computing Consortium

Check out what the CCC Projects have been up to!

Gramine

Gramine project (formerly known as Graphene) will release a new stable version v1.2 in upcoming weeks.

Gramine is a library OS that enables protecting sensitive workloads with Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX). Gramine runs unmodified Linux applications on Intel® SGX out of the box and provides all functionality required for end-to-end protection of workloads: remote SGX attestation, transparent encryption of security-critical files, secure multi-processing. Gramine follows a “lift-and-shift” paradigm for running unmodified applications: to “graminize” the application, it is enough to write a so-called *manifest* file that reflects a runtime configuration of the protected application. Gramine also supports Docker integration via a tool called Gramine Shielded Containers (GSC) and provides a growing set of curated applications, runtimes and frameworks.

In comparison to the previous release, Gramine v1.2 introduces a major overhaul of the FS subsystem. In particular, the Protected Files (PF) feature was significantly reworked. A new manifest syntax allows to mark whole FS mounts for encryption. The PF feature is now available not only in the SGX mode of Gramine, but also in the direct mode, for ease of debugging. We also added support for renaming PFs, memory mapping them with read-write permissions and encrypting them with different user-supplied encryption keys. As a side effect of this rework, multiple bugs in the FS and PF subsystems were fixed.

Additionally, Gramine v1.2 introduces a final reworked CPU/NUMA topology feature (previously marked as experimental). Now, CPU/NUMA topology is securely forwarded inside a Gramine SGX enclave and enabled by default. Among other improvements in Gramine, we highlight better support for CentOS/Fedora/RHEL Linux distributions and the update of the EPID SGX attestation tools to use IAS API v4. We also added a Rust example (a simple web server that uses hyper and tokio crates), as well as a new Python example for SGX quote retrieval.

Along with this technical work, Gramine was presented in different forums and featured in articles and blog posts:

– Gramine talk at the FOSDEM’22 conference: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/tee_gramine/

– Gramine talk at a Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) webinar:  https://confidentialcomputing.io/webinar-gramine/

– Highlighted in several use cases and projects at the Open Confidential Computing Conference (OC3 2022) conference: https://www.oc3.dev/program

– Integration with Open Federated Learning (OpenFL) framework: https://medium.com/openfl/a-path-towards-secure-federated-learning-c2fb16d5e66e

– Integration with IBM/Gematik e-Prescription solution: https://github.com/eRP-FD/vau-base-image

– Reference solutions with Gramine as part of the Confidential Computing Zoo (CCZoo): https://github.com/intel/confidential-computing-zoo

– Whitepaper “Computation offloading to hardware accelerators in Intel SGX and Gramine Library OS”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01813

– Blog post “How Open Source Gramine Accelerates Expanding Confidential Computing Market”: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-open-source-gramine-accelerates-expanding-confidential-mona-vij/?trk=articles_directory

– A series of technical blog posts: https://gramineproject.io/blog/

For more information on the release please check out: https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/releases/tag/v1.2

We invite you to join the Gramine community and contribute to adoption of confidential computing through open source collaboration. We also look forward to your feedback as you deploy this latest release of Gramine for your solutions.

Enarx

The Enarx project had three releases this quarter:

– Enarx 0.3.0 (Chittorgarh Fort) released in March with TLS support, attestation & validation support (https://blog.enarx.dev/chittorgarh-fort/).

– Enarx 0.4.0 (Fort of Dhat al-Hajj) released in April with SGX2 support, improved TLS support, and much more (https://blog.enarx.dev/enarx-0-4-0-fort-dhat-al-hajj/).

– Enarx 0.5.0 (Elmina Castle) released in May with many new/improved features: New enarx deploy subcommand. SGX with EDMM / SGX2 support (https://blog.enarx.dev/elmina-castle/).

In addition to Linux, Enarx is now available on MacOs, Windows, and Raspberry Pi:

– Enarx can now be compiled on additional platforms in a light development version. From MacOS to Raspberry Pi — Extending the Enarx Development Platforms.  (https://blog.enarx.dev/backend-nil/)

The Enarx project announced the Cryptle Hack Challenge:

– Cryptle is a secure multi-player clone of Wordle. The goal of the Cryptle Hack Challenge is to uncover vulnerabilities in the Enarx project. (https://blog.enarx.dev/cryptle-hack-challenge/).

The Enarx community has achieved a huge milestone: we have collectively published 100 tutorials and articles over at Wasm Builders!

– As part of the Confidential Computing Fellowship program, the Enarx project has received several mentees from Outreachy and LFX Mentorship. Wasm Builders has served as a welcoming environment where Enarx community members can share their learning experiences with others (https://blog.enarx.dev/enarx-community-reachs-100-tutorials/).

The Enarx project has participated in the following events:

– Nathaniel McCallum presented “WASI Networking” at Wasm Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 (https://blog.profian.com/wasm-day-at-kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe-2022/).

– Outreachy intern Shraddha Inamdar presented “Enarx: The Platform Abstraction for Trusted Execution Environments” at FOSSASIA (https://enarx.dev/resources/2022-04-09-fossasia).

– CCC Fireside Chat: Stephen Walli received Mike Bursell to discuss his book “Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud,” with a particular focus on the impact of Confidential Computing on security, trust and risk (https://blog.profian.com/trust-in-computer-systems-and-the-cloud/).

Veracruz

• We recently announced our 22.05 release which included first-time contributions from several people including Aryan Godara, Mohamed Abdelfatah, and Sagar Arya.  Many of these contributions focussed on adding new examples to the Veracruz repository.  Mohamed will be joining us as our Outreachy-sponsored intern shortly, working on providing better documentation of the expected behavior of Wasi system calls (https://github.com/veracruz-project/veracruz/releases/tag/veracruz-2205).
• We’ve worked to simplify Veracruz attestation further, across all of our supported platforms, making the process more uniform and removing platform-specific quirks.
• We’ve started work, and are progressing quickly, on supporting seL4 as an in-enclave operating system for ultra-low TCB enclaves.
• We’ve worked to improve Veracruz documentation.
• Many other smaller bug fixes, performance improvements, and upgrades of dependencies to fix security concerns.

Check out what the CCC Projects have been up to!

Gramine

Following the first production-ready release “v1.0”, The Gramine Project is releasing “v1.1” in upcoming weeks. One highlight of this release is stability improvements for Golang and Rust workloads. Another prominent feature of the release is support for the musl C standard library – now Gramine allows users to choose between glibc and musl, depending on users’ requirements on the binary size (TCB), as musl is more light-weight than glibc. Also, AddressSanitizer was integrated in Gramine, and it runs in the CI on each change, for detecting any security issues ahead of code merge. This version adds several other features as well as multiple bug fixes (thanks to our ever-increasing user base for reporting issues!).

While there are several use cases under development, we would like to highlight the production release of the OpenVino Security Add-on (OVSA) for Model IP protection (consider using it for your protected ML workloads). Please reach out to the Gramine team if you are experimenting with Gramine and would like to be added to the list of “Users of Gramine”

Enarx

In Enarx’s first release “version .0.1.0” (codenamed Alamo) we provided WebAssembly as a runtime. For our upcoming release “version 0.2.0” this coming quarter we are looking forward to providing support for attestation, including Intel’s SGX and AMD’s SEV.

Other areas where we are working on are support for filesystem and networking, which depend on upstream collaboration with the WebAssembly community.

Enarx is under high development and is not production ready yet, but our hope is that these initial releases will allow developers to experiment with Enarx and see its progress.

If you are interested in learning more about the Enarx project, please access our website, star us on GitHub, and join our chat.

We are just finishing the second year of the Confidential Computing Consortium, and it is time once again to look back on what the members have accomplished together. 

Membership & Project Growth

All of our meetings start with the reminder that all members are welcome and all projects are welcome. It have been this way since we launched. 

Remember that companies create non-profits like the Consortium in the broad open source space because our businesses benefit from that membership, and from working together towards common goals. We launched the Consortium with 15 premier and general members, growing to 27 corporate members and 2 non-profits by the end of the first year. While we lost a few members this year as company priorities shift, we have continued to grow to 36 corporate members and 4 non-profits over this past year. 

This year we welcomed the following companies to the Consortium: 

Ampere, Applied Blockchain, Baidu USA, Canary Bit, Cisco, Crust, Edgeless, En|viel, Ethernity Cloud, HUB Security, Madana, Opague Systems Inc, Phalla Network, Technology Innovation Institute, Western Digital, Xilinx. 

Our newest general member last week is Profian. The addition of general members through the year brought us over the twenty mark and we added a new general member representative to the governing board (Eric Voit, Cisco). 

A primary part of our shared mission is to support open source and standards projects relating to confidential computing to accelerate the acceptance and adoption of confidential computing in the market. This year the Consortium welcomed four new projects:

• Keystone: Keystone is an open-source project for building trusted execution environments (TEE) with secure hardware enclaves, based on the RISC-V architecture. Our goal is to build a secure and trustworthy open-source secure hardware enclave, accessible to everyone in industry and academia.
• Veracruz: Veracruz is a research project exploring the design of privacy-preserving distributed systems.  Veracruz uses strong isolation technology and remote attestation protocols to establish a “neutral ground” within which a collaborative, multi-party computation between a group of mistrusting principals takes place.
• Gramine: Gramine is a rebranded Graphene project. A particular use case for Gramine is Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), where applications do not work out-of-the-box. Gramine solves this problem, with the added security benefits. Gramine can serve as a compatibility layer on other platforms.
• Occlum: Occlum makes running applications inside enclaves easy. It allows one to run unmodified programs inside enclaves with just a few simple commands.

The Technical Advisory Council (TAC)

The Technical Advisory Council continues to meet every other week. It is an opinionated public debate and everyone is welcome to attend. Members in the TAC saw the need to begin to add some structure and this year created the idea of Special Interest Groups (SIG) as they put in place the Attestation SIG. It was recognized by members that attestation will become the next challenge in confidential computing and have begun the discussion of how best to enable TEE attestation across the industry. 

The TAC membership also published a more detailed Technical Analysis of Confidential Computing white paper.

The Outreach Committee

Outreach Committee members were also busy this year in their collaboration. The Consortium Webinar Series has been building with monthly entries covering our projects and topics that span our domain. This is a good quick way to get an introduction to projects as each project has contributed to the collection. 

A global pandemic makes it tough to gather together, but this year the members organized and ran the first Confidential Computing Developer Summit, C2DS in June. It was run as a virtual unconference with a full day of content. There was good attendance with 400 registered developers participating through the day. All the feedback was good and the team looks forward to building an event again this coming year. 

The Outreach Committee commissioned an analyst group to produce a market study this year. Working with members, the analysts have built a view of the confidential computing industry in its growth. The study will be published this month. 

Lastly, Outreach Committee members have been working towards launching an End User Advisory Council to attract broader input into how users of confidential computing technology see the challenges ahead. We had hoped to launch the advisory council at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in September, but pulled back as people continue to be cautious with pandemic travel. Look for a launch in the near future. 

Outreach is working with the Linux Foundation creative staff to improve the Consortium website and we will be rolling changes out soon.

General Administrivia

I have long joked that governing boards should be boring places voting on meeting minutes, money, and membership. 

• In keeping with that intent, we continue to run a healthy budget surplus as working committees spend money cautiously in a pandemic. 
• We reviewed and tuned our charter last year in the Fall. As members continued to evolve our transparent, collaborative endeavor together, they had suggestions for tweaks to the charter that were voted last Fall. We will open the charter again shortly to see what new changes will be proposed. In making this an annual practice, it becomes an easy muscle to exercise, and debates don’t become worrisome and contentious. 

We continue to get great support from the Linux Foundation services teams. Stephano Cetola has recently moved to become a technical director at the RISC-V organization. While we are sad to see him go, Brian Warner is stepping into the role of Linux Foundation program manager. This year Ashley Weltz joined the program management team to help put the developer summit and end user advisory council in place. 

I look forward to continue working with all of our members in the coming year. A number of new projects have approached the Consortium. New members continue to express interest. It should be an exciting year ahead. 

Updated January 2022 to reflect new members joining in Q4 of 2021.