The witness network safeguards against split-view attacks by transparency logs, but detecting malicious behavior by witnesses is more difficult than with transparency logs. Today’s witness network is primarily backed by custom hardware to protect witness private keys, but scaling the network will require an approach that’s easier to deploy.
Confidential computing is a hardware backed approach to protecting virtual machines in the cloud, such that neither the cloud providers or operators can tamper with key material. This talk will cover how confidential computing works, how we can leverage it to run witnesses in the cloud, and other potential applications of confidential computing.
Speaker
Adit is a software engineer with a focus on embedded software and privacy preserving computing. In his spare time, he has written Itko, a Static CT and RFC6962 compliant certificate transparency log. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology, currently working at K2 Space on flight software.
