from Hacker News

$3B secret program undermining Biden's tech policy

by Umofomia on 5/24/24, 4:57 PM with 11 comments

  • by alephnerd on 5/24/24, 5:40 PM

    For reference, this is talking about Intel SGX (though they also funded AMD's SEV which is what Google uses internally)

    Unlike the negative spin put on this by Politico, it does have actual tangible usecases in encryption and locking down your attack surface from a process based attack standpoint, as well as minimizing side channel attacks.

    When you're dealing with nation state level espionage, it's a valid attack surface.

    This is also the underlying research that enabled the entire Confidental Computing segment (eg. Fortanix and Hashicorp Vault)

    Edit:

    What is confidential computing?

    Basically how to process data in use without knowing the underlying data itself.

    So, if I need to train a model on PII, I can encrypt that PII dataset yet still get an equally functional model.

    This means requiring trusted execution on R/W+ functions, ideally via some form of a trusted VM. Sort of like eBPF's VM but even more lower stack.

  • by jauntywundrkind on 5/24/24, 5:45 PM

    I'm part sympathetic (to a right wing slanted site's angst against how Biden's program is going), but also, those doesn't feel that out of line with the intent of the CHIPS act. It depends on what the expected outcome is, but figuring out how to rely on and have trust in the security of the chips we are making, making sure they don't have secret backdoors or hidden circuits, making sure the enclaves really are secure: that feels like it's definitely a key part of maintaining the US.

    That said, $3B is a ton of money for who knows exactly what. How will this effort help and who? Ideally this would fund good efforts that everyone could use to advance the general state of computing security. But in all probability, this will get buried away in DoD projects that don't help anyone.

    One shout out, while looking for more information on CHIPS, I ran across this wikipedia blurb,

    > And $1.5 billion funds the USA Telecommunications Act of 2020, which aims to enhance competitiveness of software and hardware supply chains of open RAN 5G networks

    That's cool! That's how we should be funding advancements!

    Facebook/Meta donated a huge amount of super awesome work on their 5g EvenStar platform to OpenCompute, which seems to have incredibly solid figures-of-merit, built with hyperscaler minded cut-throat cost-effectiveness. I'd love to see these kind of blistering cutting edge state of the art works get support help & advancement!

  • by hulitu on 5/25/24, 7:57 PM

    > $3B secret program undermining Biden's tech policy

    Let me tell you a secret. /s

  • by asnyder on 5/24/24, 5:13 PM

    Really gross. Honestly, has America always been this corrupt or the last 20 years really hitting its stride?

    As if the DOD doesn't have enough funds, they have to pull new taxpayers funds for this clearly wasteful program.

    Some super secretive, non-collaborative, non-competitive, bureaucratic run foundry will surely be worse over the long run.

    Sounds like DoD wants their own foundry but won't even reach into their existing bloated budget to do it. Shameful. Would be a bad idea even if it was from their budget but less terrible than the current situation.