So I was reading this article about Signal-creator Moxie Marlinspike’s new project, Confer , which claims to be a verifiably E2E encrypted LLM chat service. There are a couple of short blog articles that give the gist of it, and some github repos including this one that includes scripts for producing the VM that will run your particular LLM session. But if I’m following this all correctly, it implies that every chat session (or perhaps every logged-in user) would have their own VM running their own LLM to ensure that the chain of trust is complete. This seems impossible from a scalability perspective, as even small LLMs require huge quantities of RAM and compute. Did I miss something fundamental here?
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Moxie loves these closed-source hardware enclaves. Signal servers and MobileCoin rely on this too, if I’m not mistaken.
In my opinion this not the right way to go about these things, but then again I’m not a renowned cryptohead like Moxie.
For both MobileCoin and Signal the TEE are not relied upon for the security of the general application but only for some convenience feature that are required for mass adoption but that you can go without using them.
Also, while TEE are not bulletproof, in such a server situation, it means that getting user data means much more invasive compromise than just querying the database. It’s an imperfect solution, but an improvement nonetheless.