permanentdecaf

I am by no means an SGX expert, but my understanding has been that it allows you to shorten the "trust stack."

What you're referring to as "the server" is really a technology stack that starts with the CPU hardware and extends to the service operator. Without SGX, the trust stack probably looks something like: Intel, the OS, the VM, the cloud provider (Amazon, Google, Microsoft), the server software, the server operator.

Any of those points on the trust stack can be compromised by their principals or by an attacker (for example, Amazon could choose to interfere with Signal, or someone could hack Amazon and do the same). This is true for the OS, the software, the service provider, and everything else in the stack. Users have to trust all of those points, and additionally trust them not to be compromised.

SGX shortens the trust stack all the way down to the CPU. It takes the OS, the VM, the cloud provider, the service operator, and everything else out of the equation. Clients no longer have to trust any of them, either to be honest or to avoid compromise.

If trusting the CPU isn't acceptable to you, then that might be a bigger problem than you realize, since all computing has to. If you'd rather put your trust in AES, the problem is that you still have to trust the CPU to perform AES the way you would like it to.

> As much as I hate to admit it (I love my servers) I think serverless is the future for most CRUD / admin API's.

The pattern for CRUD is pretty straightforward, you have an API that sits in front of a memcache/redis layer and a database. There's nothing really stateful about the API, so it should be a good candidate for a lambda function.

However, since a lambda function is stateless, that means you can't maintain a connection to a caching or database layer. As far as I can tell, that means you can't actually build a scalable CRUD API with lambda?

To say that Signal is secure because of the people, or to say that WhatsApp isn't secure because of Facebook only feeds the logic of Pavel Durov and all the charlatans of the world.

The point of all of this should be that it's not about people, places, or jurisdictions. If you make it about that, the charlatans who want you to think that Switzerland = secure will win every time.

Marketing.

Sadly, one of the conclusions you can draw from Telegram is that a security business is almost better off with no security.

Pavel Durov says that Telegram is "heavily" encrypted over and over again, journalists who don't know better take that at face value and encode it into every headline ("Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, ..."), and meanwhile since there is no encryption there is no risk of anyone finding or publishing vulnerabilities in it.

Since cryptography already seems unreal to most people (and is always just a matter of getting the smart IT guy to 'crack' it on television), everyone's already predisposed to thinking that security = Switzerland. Unless there's a major change, the charlatans will win every time.