The Next Episode in Workload Isolation: Confidential Containers - Jeremi Piotrowski, Microsoft

The Next Episode in Workload Isolation: Confidential Containers - Jeremi Piotrowski, Microsoft

Container based workloads are isolated at the OS level by default. Stronger isolation can be achieved using Kata Containers which adds a hardware isolation boundary. New hardware capabilities have appeared in CPUs in recent years that open up the possibility of enhancing this isolation with an added level of confidentiality. Kata-CC is an extension of Kata Containers that makes use of Trusted Execution Environment features present in modern CPUs to enhance security in a multi-tenant environment by combining workload attestation and memory encryption. An issue hindering wider adoption of this technology for some time has been hardware availability. New developments which will be covered in this talk address this and make confidentiality more accessible than ever. Jeremi will talk about the available ways to deploy containers in SEV-SNP (secure encrypted virtualization - secure nested paging) protected confidential virtual machines and dig into their respective architectures. He will also talk about the challenges with hardware attestation and how it ensures workload portability.