Poetic Intents: Seeding the next generation of TEEs.

Proposal for the Creation of an Open Source TEE Initiative

As the demand for confidential computing applications rises, ensuring the integrity and verifiability of the software we rely on is essential to fostering trust in the digital ecosystem and prevent people’s data from being compromised. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are crucial to protecting this data, but the problem is clear: current TEEs are proprietary, opaque, and vulnerable. In a world with power asymmetries, building the grounds for autonomous confidential computation is a means to gain a strategic advantage. We are calling on a broad alliance to unite in building an open-source solution. Together, we can create tamper-resistant hardware and secure, reproducible software that goes beyond the limitations of Intel and AMD. We need transparency and trust at the core of our digital future. - join us in making it happen!

Call to Action

We invite academic institutions, TEE builders, and VCs to join us in our Poetic Autonomous TEE initiative. We face the risk of relying on centralized authorities for security, which lack transparency, cannot be publicly audited, and may potentially expose data that doesn’t belong to them. At the larger level, what’s at stake here is not just creating the next generation of auditable and tamper resistant TEEs for confidential compute, but the decentralization of chip production itself, which is a civilization risk we have to hedge for. By pooling and complementing resources, expertise, and poetic visions, we can pave the way for a future where secure decentralized computing is accessible, transparent, and community-driven. Together, we can redefine the landscape of Trusted Execution Environments for the benefit of all stakeholders involved.

Stakeholders

Bringing together developers, academics, companies and venture capital firms is essential because each contributes a unique and crucial element to the success of this initiative. TEE builders offer the technical expertise to design secure, transparent, and tamper-resistant systems. Academic institutions, with their cutting-edge research, bring innovative ideas and advancements in cryptography and secure computing to the table. Venture Capital firms provide the financial backing needed to accelerate development and scale solutions quickly, while By uniting these stakeholders, we can pool resources, knowledge, and innovation to create a trustless TEE that is superior to proprietary alternatives. Collaboration across these sectors is the only way to achieve a transparent, secure solution the world can trust.

Objectives

• Develop Trustless TEE Architecture: 1a) Develop open-source signature hardware with strong embedded security guarantees (side-channel, faults) and (1b) Leverage such a tamper proof hardware into an Trustless TEE architecture. For this objective we are exploring synergies with UCLouvain’s Crypto Group (https://www-crypto.elen.ucl.ac.be/crypto/) and the SIMPLE-Crypto Association (https://www.simple-crypto.org/).
• Standardize Open Protocols and Tooling to make Hardware: Establish common protocols, standards and tools for TEEs to facilitate interoperability and ease of integration across various platforms. Tooling for hardware includes RTL, HDL (verilog, vhdl) EDA, PDKs, GDSII.
• Foster Open Source Community Engagement: Build a vibrant community of developers, hardware researchers, open foundries (e.g. skywater) and users who contribute to the ongoing improvement of open-source TEEs. How to join and contribute to efforts in the open silicon community and open source hardware?
• Promote Security Awareness: Increase awareness of the importance of security in computing environments, advocating for the adoption of Trustless TEEs and the need for decentralized confidential compute across different industries (not just crypto).

Next Steps

Short term

• Sign up here for the initial stakeholder meeting on Monday, 14. October 2024 at 16:00 CEST to discuss interest, risk, partnerships and commitment with the goal of establishing a public Autonomous / Trustless TEE alliance.
• Define areas of focus such as technical development, research collaborations and fundraising.
• Develop a detailed project timeline with milestones for deliverables.
• Seed the entity that will steward the process.
• If you have any questions please reach out at: hello@poeticte.ch