I wonder how much more expensive it is to rent the whole physical machine at all times for confidential computing purposes, compared to the losses incurred by a breach.
The premise of attestation is supposed to be that you can use hardware even though it's in the physical possession of someone you don't trust. It's a terrible idea, because vulnerabilities are found on a regular basis and the party you're not supposed to be trusting is then already in possession of your sensitive data when the next one is published. The premise should be abandoned and the parties attempting to get anyone to rely on it should be lampooned and run out of town.
Not having a multi-tenant system is something else. There you're trying to be protected from other customers, not the provider. Excluding other tenants still wouldn't protect you against the provider, especially on systems with proprietary and potentially exploitable ring -1 hardware they could already be silently in control of even when the entire machine is allocated to you.
Meanwhile for anything on the scale of an organization, having physical possession of the machine yourself isn't that expensive. People got hoodwinked when virtualization first came around because they compared the cost of having a mostly-idle physical server for each of their applications to having that many cloud VMs, and the cloud VMs were cheaper, but that isn't the right comparison. You don't compare having 100 physical machines to having 100 VMs, even if people used to use 100 physical machines for that in 2005. You compare it to having three physical machines that can each run 100 VMs, and then having physical possession of your own hardware is frequently less expensive.
A lot more expensive and this is required for any classified data. I honestly don't think you can truly securely share a CPU with a hostile tenant because their are just too many side-channels.
A hostile tenant is insufficient if you read the summary. You need a malicious hypervisor (ie your cloud provider) or a way to escape the sandbox and attack the hypervisor. Both attacks are highly unlikely in practice
Yeah I mean sunk cost fallacy, right? If you’ve already hit critical mass in AWS of course you’re going continue investing in it.
If I were to be CTO of a brand new company today, I’d probably just colocate my own servers with K8S. Much cheaper and much lower latency. 2x 1TB RAM servers with 3x 8TB high speed U.2/U.3 drives each would last years.
(1) They will usually notify a few minutes (or hours) in advance, and (2) it would take a few minutes to spin up and set up a new VM to replace the old, without leaving your terminal.
Not having a multi-tenant system is something else. There you're trying to be protected from other customers, not the provider. Excluding other tenants still wouldn't protect you against the provider, especially on systems with proprietary and potentially exploitable ring -1 hardware they could already be silently in control of even when the entire machine is allocated to you.
Meanwhile for anything on the scale of an organization, having physical possession of the machine yourself isn't that expensive. People got hoodwinked when virtualization first came around because they compared the cost of having a mostly-idle physical server for each of their applications to having that many cloud VMs, and the cloud VMs were cheaper, but that isn't the right comparison. You don't compare having 100 physical machines to having 100 VMs, even if people used to use 100 physical machines for that in 2005. You compare it to having three physical machines that can each run 100 VMs, and then having physical possession of your own hardware is frequently less expensive.