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3 predictions for open source in confidential computing Dpal Mon, 01/23/2023 - 03:00

It's a new year, which means it's time to predict what the next year will bring regarding future tech trends. After guessing the World Cup champion, I feel confident sharing my personal perspective on the confidential computing market in the near future.

What is confidential computing?

Confidential computing is the practice of isolating sensitive data and the techniques used to process it. This is as important on your laptop, where your data must be isolated from other applications, as it is on the cloud, where your data must be isolated from thousands of other containers and user accounts. As you can imagine, open source is a significant component for ensuring that what you believe is confidential is actually confidential. This is because security teams can audit the code of an open source project.

Confidential computing is a big space. When I talk about confidential computing, I first think of workloads running inside trusted execution environments (TEE). There are several categories of such workloads:

• Off-the-shelf products provided by a vendor
• Products built by a third party that need to be adapted and integrated into the customer environment
• Applications built and run by companies in support of their business

Off-the-shelf security products

Applications in this category already exist, and are expected to mature over the course of the year. The number of these applications is also expected to grow. Examples of applications include hardware security modules (HSM), security vaults, encryption services, and other security-related applications that render themselves to be the first choice for adopting confidential computing. While these applications exist, they constitute a fraction of the potential workloads that can run inside a TEE.

Third-party enablement applications

Workloads in this category are the ones built by software vendors for other customers. They require adaptation and integration for use. A vendor who makes this kind of software isn't a security vendor, but instead relies on security vendors (like Profian) to help them adapt their solutions to confidential computing. Such software includes AI software trained on customer data, or a database holding customer data for secure processing.

Homemade applications

These applications are built by customers for their internal use, leveraging assistance and enablement from confidential computing vendors.

Developing confidential computing technology

I suspect that third-party and homemade applications have similar dynamics. However, I expect more progress in a third-party enablement application segment, and here is why.

In the past year, a lot of discovery and educational activities were developed. Confidential computing is now better known, but it has yet to become a mainstream technology. The security and developer communities are gaining a better understanding of confidential computing and its benefits. If this discovery trend continues this year, it can influence more outlets, like conferences, magazines, and publications. This shows that these entities recognize the value of confidential computing. In time, they may start to offer more airtime for talks and articles on the subject.

Prediction #1: Pilot programs

The next phase after discovery is creating a pilot. Profian is seeing more interest among different vendors to move forward in building solutions and products that consciously target execution within trusted environments. This year, I expect to see a lot of pilot programs. Some of them can become production ready within the year. And some can pave the way for production-ready implementation next year.

Further interest is generated by greater visibility of confidential computing, a better understanding of the technology, and its value. In addition, the success of pilots, actual products, and services based on confidential computing platforms is guaranteed to generate interest.

Over the years, companies have collected and stored a lot of data about their business. If used using analytics and AI, this data helps companies improve business operations. They can also offer new or improved services and products to customers. Some of the data and models are valuable and need to be handled with security in mind. That's an ideal use case for confidential computing.

Companies looking to put their data to good use should start asking questions about security. This eventually leads them to discover confidential computing. From there, they can express interest in leveraging trusted environments to do computation. This, in turn, grows the attention of the companies (in the third-party category above) that provide products in this space to consider putting some of their products and offerings into confidential computing. I don't expect to see drastic changes in this area during this year. I do anticipate a shift in mindset toward recognizing the value of confidential computing and how it can help on a greater scale.

More on security The defensive coding guide 10 layers of Linux container security SELinux coloring book More security articles Prediction #2: Hardware and confidential computing

This year, I expect new hardware chips supporting confidential computing from different vendors and architectures. The hardware ecosystem is growing and that should continue this year. This gives more options to consumers, but also creates more requirements for hardware-agnostic solutions.

Prediction #3: Open standards

Finally, multiple security vendors are working on different deployment and attestation solutions. As those solutions mature, the need for some kind of interoperability is expected. Efforts for standardization are underway. But this year is likely to bring more pressure for projects to agree upon standardization and rules for interoperability.

Open source in confidential computing

Open source is key in confidential computing. The Enarx project provides a runtime environment, based on WebAssembly. This allows deploying a workload into a TEE in an architecture- and language-indifferent way. With the general awareness trends I've described above, I expect more engineers to join the open source ecosystem of confidential computing projects. This year, more developers might contribute to all elements of the stack, including the kernel, WebAssembly, Rust crates and tools, and Enarx itself.

Maybe one of those developers is you. If so, I look forward to collaborating with you.

Confidential computing is becoming more widely known by security and developer communities. Look out for these key trends in 2023.

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How Linux rescued precious audio files with FFmpeg Don Watkins Sun, 01/22/2023 - 03:00

Recently I was asked by a customer to create compact discs of priceless family recordings. My client insisted that the media be delivered as compact discs and not as digital files in an MP3 player or other similar device. One of the source recordings was on a compact disc and in AIFF format. As such my client could not play this media that contained her husband's voice. I was able to convert it using Audacity, and then was able to burn it to a compact disc with Brasero, which has been my go to CD creation tool.

The balance of the audio files were in MP3 format. I was able to create compact discs with Brasero very quickly. There was, however, one file that was so large that it exceeded the capacity of the compact disc medium. This large file contained nearly two hours of audio. The capacity of compact discs is 72 minutes.

This presented a problem. How could I split the large file into smaller segments that would allow me to create media and fit on media that my client could use? I decided to use a DVD instead of a compact disc. Using a DVD provided me with a much larger capacity disc, but how could I convert the MP3 files to a format that would allow me to create a DVD? I tried using HandBrake, but was unable to convert MP3 to MP4 format because MP4 expected a video stream, and I had no video. Then I discovered that I could use FFmpeg to convert the files.

Convert media files with FFmpeg

If you're looking for a powerful tool to help you with your audio and video files, look no further than FFmpeg. FFmpeg is highly versatile and able to support an impressive range of popular formats like MP3, MP4, and AVI. You can also use it to convert files between different formats, which was very useful in my case.

You can easily install FFmpeg on your Linux system in a terminal on Fedora and similar distributions:

$ sudo dnf install ffmpeg

On Debian and similar distributions:

$ sudo apt install ffmpeg

According to its man page, "FFmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio and video source. It can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high-quality polyphase filter." FFmpeg has excellent documentation in addition to an extensive man page.

The command-line interface of this tool might seem daunting for newcomers, but this feature is what makes it so powerful. Developers and system administrators can easily write scripts to automate complex tasks. If you make the most of this feature you can streamline your workflow like a pro.

Using the command-line interface, I was able to convert the MP3 file to the required MP4 format using the following command:

$ ffmpeg -f lavfi -i color=c=black:s=1280x720:r=5 \ -i audio.mp3 \ -crf 0 -c:a copy -shortest output.mp4

The -f lavfi option sets a virtual input device as the source of the video stream. Essentially, this creates a video file (which is what a video DVD requires) instead of an audio file. The audio file I actually care about gets included thanks to the -i audio.mp3 option. The video that gets created is a black screen, as defined by -i:

color=c=black:s=1280x720:r=5.

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I ran into a snag using Brasero with this new MP4 file. Brasero would not create a DVD without the addition of a couple of cstreamer codec. From some quick research, I found another open source DVD creation program called DevedeNG that had everything I needed built-in. Upon installing the DevedeNG program, I was able to create the DVD media in 20 minutes. Your time may vary, depending on your computer system. DevedeNG is licensed under GPLv3.

Solving problems with open source

FFmpeg is licensed under the GNU Public License. FFmpeg is always evolving! The project is actively maintained and updated on a regular basis. This gives you the latest features, improvements, and bug fixes so you can rest easy knowing your audio and video formats are supported.

Another way I could have resolved the space issue was by burning the MP3 audio as data files onto the DVD, leveraging the 4 GB of space available on the DVD for just the audio data. The DVD would have basically been, in that scenario, a hard drive. You'd insert it into your computer and listen to the MP3 file through music player software.

The way I ended up burning the audio DVD created a media DVD, which is recognized by either a computer or a DVD player. Because there's an "empty" video stream (it's actually not empty, it has black pixels in it), DVD players recognize the media as a movie. This means that when you listen to the audio track, you're actually watching a blank video with accompanying audio.

There's no right or wrong way to solve these puzzles. What's important is that you know how to get to the place you need to be. The goal was to preserve audio that was of particular importance to my client, and open source made it possible.

FFmpeg is a highly versatile tool that supports a range of popular formats like MP3, MP4, and AVI. You can also use it to convert files between different formats.

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