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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Within 10 years every mainstream computing hardware environment will have some kind of TEE. They already exist on the iPhone (the SEP), Google's Android phones (the ARM TEE), upcoming high-end ARM processors in general (I think they were calling it "CryptoIsland"?), high-end Intel processors (SGX) and high-end AMD processors (SEV).

The whole point of Asylo is to provide a hardware abstraction layer to make applications portable across different enclaves; it's the opposite of reinforcing Intel's position.

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Disclaimer: I am from the Asylo team.

That’s exactly the level of abstraction that we’re looking to provide in Asylo. The parent post linked to the asylo/identity/sgx directory, which contains SGX-specific implementations of some of our higher-level identity abstractions [1]. For instance, “EnclaveAssertionGenerator” defines an interface for generating attestations bound to an enclave’s identity, and “sgx::LocalAssertionGenerator” (an internal construct to our framework) provides that functionality for SGX.

[1] https://github.com/google/asylo/tree/master/asylo/identity

The whole point of Asylo is to provide a hardware abstraction layer to make applications portable across different enclaves; it's the opposite of reinforcing Intel's position.

My main concern is not "reinforcing Intel's position" --- it could just as well be AMD, or ARM, or any other relatively tiny group of hardware manufacturers; the point is that everyone else is giving up and handing the ultimate control over their computing devices and the software they run to a small group, and that is most doubleplus ungood.

> The whole point of Asylo is to provide a hardware abstraction layer to make applications portable across different enclaves; it's the opposite of reinforcing Intel's position.

Yes, I shouldn't have conflated Asylo and SGX (or TEEs in general – where SGX is now dominant for the remote attestation model). The concern was with SGX, maybe even specifically to it being used together with other TEEs for ubiquitous DRM on consumer devices. Asylo could indeed drive competition in the case of remote attestation.

Would I need a commercial Intel license to use it for Intel SGX? I ask because they don't seem to hand out the licenses to everyone. https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx/commercial-use-license-... https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-software-guard...

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