Just to be clear, code running on a remote server is not code running in the client. Just because the server attests to the client doesn’t mean the client is running that code. You still have to do all of the threat modeling for the attested code differently from the threat modeling for the client.

I’m not yet prepared to publicly get into all of the nuances of SGX, but I think it’s worth noting that there’s something very interesting happening there. I look forward to being able to discuss my team’s technical findings on the subject in public.

To summarize why this is so interesting: the attack surface is the whole system. Enclaves let us extend parts of our trust model to systems we don’t own. That is a real change and, if it works, it’s going to change how systems are designed at a deep level. The problem is that there aren’t very many working implementations of sgx in the Wild (signal is the only one I know of).

We’ll see where the wind blows.