Red Hat smitten by secure enclaves 'cos some sysadmins are evil

Red Hat has revealed a plan to to work with CPU-makers so that its wares can take advantage of in-silicon security features such as secure enclaves.

The company today told attendees at its 2018 Summit in San Francisco that it will work with major silicon shops, including Arm, Intel, and AMD, to move operations such as handling security keys into secured enclaves that are inaccessible to the operating system.

In those cases, Red Hat says, only the applications themselves would be cleared to access the information in the enclave, meaning an intruder who had compromised a server or VM (such as via a malware infection or side channel attack) would be isolated from the sensitive data.