Intel Trust Authority

1. A confidential computing workload attests its identity and fidelity by providing TEE measurements and other cryptographic evidence, called a quote.

2. A verifier evaluates the quote against reference values and endorsers determine if the quote is valid and if certain claims match stored values and policies.

3. A relying party uses information in the attestation token to decide if it should trust the attester.

Intel Trust Authority is focused on providing services for step 2, verification. They are providing this verification to TEEs beyond SGX and TDX, including AMD SEV. It is architected as a cloud-native microservice platform running on a managed Kubernetes service.

The attesting workload is responsible for collecting evidence for a quote, using an Intel Trust Authority library or other compatible method. That quote is then forwarded directly (passport) to Intel Trust Authority, or sent to a relying party that relays the quote (background check) to Intel Trust Authority.

The attestation evidence for each of microservice is *supposedly* issued by Intel Trust Authority and stored in a blockchain-backed ledger and referenced using a unique ID in every attestation token generated. These references can be used to validate the specific microservice instances that produced that token and retrieve their TEE attestation information.

The relying party must be able to process this attestation token. An Intel Trust Authority user can audit the secure processing of attestation tokens.

An attestation token is only as good as the verifier and services in the chain of trust. Intel Trust Authority attestation tokens are signed with a certificate that is traceable to the Intel CA. Intel Trust Authority microservices run in TEEs and a record is kept of TEE quotes and the services used during quote verification and attestation.

They are the first to market and already they want everybody else to use them as a trusted CA. No doubt it will be fast, efficient and easy for projects to integrate, but then again Intel Trust Authority may be as bad as it sounds: the only “Trust Authority”.

From their website: “You can configure and maintain security policies consistently across cloud deployments without having to build and maintain an expensive and complex attestation service.”

It’s a great idea to use TEE’s to secure certificates and build a public key infrastructure, and a good idea to create intermediate certificates from Intel’s Trusted CA. It would be wild to have a distributed network of enclaves acting as their own root CA.