Peer Pods

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peer Pods is the deployment model for CoCo (Confidential Containers) designed for public cloud environments where the Kubernetes worker nodes are standard VMs — not bare metal — and therefore cannot host a nested confidential VM for each pod. The fundamental constraint it solves is physical: confidential computing hardware (TDX, SEV-SNP) does not support nested virtualisation, meaning a confidential guest cannot be launched inside another VM. In the conventional CoCo deployment, the Kata Containers runtime asks a local hypervisor (QEMU/KVM) on the worker node to create a micro-VM for each pod; if the worker node is itself a VM, this requires nested virtualisation that the TEE hardware cannot provide. Peer Pods sidestep this entirely by moving the pod’s VM off the worker node and onto a separate, cloud-provisioned instance running directly on bare-metal TEE-capable hardware.

Trustee

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Trustee is the server-side attestation infrastructure for the CoCo (Confidential Containers) project, previously known as CoCo-KBS. It implements the relying-party and verifier roles from the IETF RATS (Remote ATtestation procedureS) architecture: it receives hardware attestation evidence from workloads running inside TEEs, verifies that evidence against known-good reference values, evaluates it against policy, and — if the workload passes — releases the secrets it needs to operate. Trustee runs outside the TEE in a separately trusted environment (a dedicated server, a different confidential VM, or a Kubernetes operator deployment) and is by design not accessible to the untrusted host or hypervisor.

Coco on Le Site de François

Peer Pods

Trustee