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jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Edited 14 days ago
In the sense confidential computing holds it promise that since the hardware is inaccessible by practical means to *everyone*, you need to execute that type of code in your head. It is as confidential at least as computing can ever get [Side-note: even the name of the field is incorrect terminology at least when reflecting on how the terminology is usually defined in the field of information security. The so called "CIA Triad" defines trust as the sum of availability, confidentiality and integrity.]

This is what I literally do with SGX patches:

1. I pick up Intel SDM (which is IMHO pretty good ISA reference overall, zero complains on that).
2. I read the pseudocode for new opcodes or revisit old ones.
3. I look it is applied in kernel patch
4. Finally I "hallucinate" its execution :-----)

And based on this mental execution procedure I ack/nak patches.

You can extrapolate from this that probably most of any type of CoC code in kernel are the least audited areas of the Linux kernel source code. Even if working for a CPU company, it is hard to really hammer the code, if your only access to the hardware is a shitty company cloud.
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