New attacks are diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel (arstechnica.com)

A wise elder once told me, "There are no secrets in silicon." (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00262...)

If an attacker with time and resources has physical access, you are doomed.

Good. I like the idea of a secure enclave that I own and control when it's in my computer but in practice almost all of them are deployed in a user-hostile way to the benefit of shareholders, to the point that burning the whole idea down would improve society. Imagine if every ROM and piece of CPU microcode was a lot more transparent.

These things are often used because of contractual requirements. Mainstream media including video games are often contractually protected: you must not let it run/play on any device without sufficient hardware protections. So vendors have to include these protection systems even if they don't want to. If the systems were useless, this might end.

From the article, "The low-cost, low-complexity attack works by placing a small piece of hardware between a single physical memory chip and the motherboard slot it plugs into. It also requires the attacker to compromise the operating system kernel". "Low-complexity" requires physical access and an OS compromise? What the hell would high complexity be?

As I understand, the purpose of "secure enclaves" is to enforce DRM, copyright protection, anti-debugging measures, so breaking them is a good thing.

Amazon Nitro Enclaves not effected

IMO Amazon is the obvious choice for TEE because they make billions selling isolated compute

If you built a product on Intel or AMD and need to pivot do take a look at AWS Nitro Enclaves

I built up a small stack for Nitro: https://lock.host/ has all the links

MIT everything, dev-first focus

AWS will tell you to use AWS KMS to manage enclave keys

AWS KMS is ok if you are ok with AWS root account being able to get to keys

If you want to lock your TEE keys so even root cannot access I have something i the works for this

Write to: hello@lock.host if you want to discuss

"All three chipmakers exclude physical attacks from threat models for their TEEs."

So, working as intended.