Today, Google is releasing an open source framework for the development of “confidential computing” cloud applications—a software development kit that will allow developers to build secure applications that run across multiple cloud architectures even in shared (and not necessarily trusted) environments. The framework, called Asylo, is currently experimental but could eventually make it possible for developers to address some of the most basic concerns about running applications in any multi-tenant environment.
Container systems like Docker and Kubernetes are designed largely to allow untrusted applications to run without exposing the underlying operating system to badness. Asylo (Greek for “safe place”) aims to solve the opposite problem—allowing absolutely trusted applications to run “Trusted Execution Environments” (TEEs), which are specialized execution environments that act as enclaves and protect applications from attacks on the underlying platform they run on.
“The threats people are concerned about are things like rootkits or bootkits, things that hit the lower rings of the operating system stack,” said Rob Sadowski, Google’s Trust and Security marketing lead, in an interview with Ars. “And also, when you get into cloud or any shared infrastructure—virtualization on premises or in the cloud—you could have administrators or third parties who have access at these layers. So there’s always this tension where you have people asking, ‘How do I make sure I’m the only person who has access to any of this stuff?'”
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